MihaElla > Recent Status Updates

Povestirea (mi-e teamă că e un roman) are acum peste 70 de pagini. Cred că o să fie bun. În orice caz mă distrez scriindu-l. Debutează în Bimini și probabil că se termină în iad. Cine să știe, dacă nici măcar eu nu știu.

Sper să-ți placă de Mary. E fără îndoială minunat să ai lângă tine pe cineva pe care-l iubești în loc să mori de singurătate.

Studying the gorilla last night for the twentieth time,it suddenly came into my head that I had never thanked you for that admirable treatise. This is to bear witness to my blushes & repentance.If you knew how much interest it has awakened in me,& how often it has set me a-thinking,you would consider me a more thankless beast than any gorilla that ever lived. But happily you do not know,& I am not going to tell you.

My "working life" is resolving itself at the present into another book, in twenty green leaves. You work like a Trojan at Ventnor, but you do that everywhere; and that's why you are so young.

Is that a rule? 😏

A very intelligent German friend of mine, just home from America, maintains that the conscription will succeed in the North, and that the war will be indefinitely prolonged. I say "No," and that however mad and villainous the North is, the war will finish by reason of its not supplying soldiers. We shall see. The more they brag the more I don't believe in them.

Office of "All the Year Round," Thursday, Feb. 19th, 1863.
My dearest Macready,
I have just come back from Paris, where the readings—"Copperfield," "Dombey" and "Trial," and "Carol" and "Trial"—have made a sensation which modesty (my natural modesty) renders it impossible for me to describe. You know what a noble audience the Paris audience is! They were at their very noblest with me.

Heaven! how the years roll by! We are quite old friends now, in counting by years. If we add sympathies, we have been friends at least a thousand years.

Nicely said 😎

I feel that I owe you an apology for being (innocently) a difficult subject. When I once excused myself to Ary Scheffer while sitting to him, he received the apology as strictly his due, and said with a vexed air: "At this moment, mon cher Dickens, you look more like an energetic Dutch admiral than anything else;" for which I apologised again.

I hope you may have seen a large-headed photograph with little legs, representing the undersigned, pen in hand, tapping his forehead to knock an idea out. It has just sprung up so abundantly in all the shops, that I am ashamed to go about town looking in at the picture-windows, which is my delight. It seems to me extraordinarily ludicrous, and much more like than the grave portrait done in earnest.

She was conscious only of present happiness and happy expectation. All bitterness had disappeared. At least thirty thousand Bursley folk were not going to the Isle of Man that day - their preoccupied and cheerless faces swam in a continuous stream past the cab window -- and Anna sympathized with every unit of them. Her spirit overflowed with universal compassion.

Now she saw, in a quick revelation, that it was the lovers, and not she, who had the right to scorn. She saw how miserably narrow, tepid, and trickling the stream of her life had been, and had threatened to be. Now it gushed forth warm, impetuous, and full, opening out new and delicious vistas. She lived; and she was finding the sight to see, the courage to enjoy.

A book from the Free Library lay on her lap; she could not read it. She was conscious of nothing save the quiet enchantment of the reverie. Her mind, stimulated by the emotions of the afternoon, broke the fetters of habitual self-discipline, and ranged voluptuously free over the whole field of recollection and anticipation. To remember, to hope: that was sufficient joy.

Hullah's daughter (an artist) tells me that certain female students have addressed the Royal Academy, entreating them to find a place for their education. I think it a capital move, for which I can do something popular and telling in The Register.

Yesterday I burnt, in the field at Gad's Hill, the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years. They sent up a smoke like the genie when he got out of the casket on the seashore; and as it was an exquisite day when I began, and rained very heavily when I finished, I suspect my correspondence of having overcast the face of the heavens.

h'm...lots of CO2 emissions, he is one of the drivers of global climate change

I am ornamented at present with one of my most intensely preposterous and utterly indescribable colds. If you were to make a voyage from Cape Horn to Wellington Street, you would scarcely recognize in the bowed form, weeping eyes, rasped nose, and snivelling wretch whom you would encounter here, the once gay and sparkling, etc. etc.

Generally, I am happy to report, the Emerald press is in favour of my appearance, and likes my eyes. But one gentleman comes out with a letter at Cork, wherein he says that although only forty-six I look like an old man. He is a rum customer, I think..

What a dream it is, this work and strife, and how little we do in the dream after all! Only last night, in my sleep, I was bent upon getting over a perspective of barriers, with my hands and feet bound. Pretty much what we are all about, waking, I think?

But, Lord! (as I said before) you smile pityingly, not bitterly, at this hubbub, and moralise upon it, in the calm evenings when there is no school at Sherborne.

Ne naștem, murim, iar restul e timp liber.

Vorbesc ca un bătrân ursuz, însă și ăsta e cumva rostul jurnalului de față: să mă pot plânge și eu din când în când fără a deranja pe cineva.

Șuvoaie infinite de vorbe inutile, care acoperă totul ca niște buruieni sufocante. Spuse fără cap. Fără sens. Obsesive. Rostite pentru a-i informa pe cei din jur că vorbitorul încă n-a murit și încă mai are ceva de spus. Dacă e cineva care vrea să le audă e o întrebare pe care oamenii și-o pun rar, altfel și-ar ține gura mult mai des.

Nimic din ce-i omenesc nu le e străin oamenilor în vârstă.

Am citit că s-a lansat o campanie națională împotriva pesimismului în Țările de Jos. Prin prezenta, echipa de campanie e invitată cordial să treacă pe-aici. E o pâine de mâncat. Se poate începe simplu: ziua fără boli. De fiecare dată când cineva începe ziua fără vreun disconfort fizic, trebuie să pună zece euro în pușculiță. Cu banii strânși organizăm un festin cu șampanie.

Do you care for French news? I hope not, because I don't know any. There is a melodrama, called "The French Revolution," now playing at the Cirque, in the first act of which there is the most tremendous representation of a people that can well be imagined. There are wonderful battles and so forth in the piece, but there is a power and massiveness in the mob which is positively awful.

Geneva, Saturday, October 24th, 1846.
My dear Macready,
The welcome sight of your handwriting moves me (though I have nothing to say) to show you mine,& if I could recollect the passage in Virginius I would paraphrase it,& say, "Does it seem to tremble, boy? Is it a loving autograph? Does it beam with friendship and affection?" all of which I say,as I write,with—oh Heaven!—such a splendid imitation of you,

N.B.—Observe. I think of changing my present mode of life, and am open to an engagement.
N.B. No. 2.—I will undertake not to play tragedy, though passion is my strength.
N.B. No. 3.—I consider myself a chained lion.

I have never in my life been so struck by any place as by Venice. It is the wonder of the world. Dreamy, beautiful, inconsistent, impossible, wicked, shadowy, d——able old place. I entered it by night, and the sensation of that night and the bright morning that followed is a part of me for the rest of my existence.

He is an excellent creature, and I respect him very much, so I don't mind smiling when I think of him as he appeared when addressing you and pointing to the plate, with his head a little on one side, and one of his eyes turned up languidly.

I have sent you a little book I published on the 17th of December,& which has been a most prodigious success—the greatest, I think, I have ever achieved.It pleases me to think that it will bring you home for an hour or two,& I long to hear you have read it on some quiet morning.Do they allow you to be quiet, by-the-way? "Some of our most fashionable people, sir," denounced me awfully for liking to be alone sometimes.

But I have my comedy to fly to. My only comfort! I walk up and down the street at the back of the theatre every night, and peep in at the green-room window, thinking of the time when "Dick—ins" will be called for by excited hundreds, and won't come till Mr. Webster (half Swig and half himself) shall enter from his dressing-room, and quelling the tempest with a smile,

I vow before high heaven that my blood so boils at these enormities, that when I speak about them I seem to grow twenty feet high, and to swell out in proportion. "Robbers that ye are," I think to myself when I get upon my legs, "here goes!