Button’s Reviews > The Candle in the Wind > Status Update

"Frontiers were imaginary lines....The imaginary lines on the earth's surface only needed to be unimagined.
The airborne birds skipped them by nature. How mad the frontiers had seemed to Lyo-lyok, and would to Man if he could learn to fly."

The beautiful lesson at long last. I can forgive a lot (though not all) of this book for its final lesson. It's anti-war stance. It really is a beautiful, but marred, book.

Lionel and Bors are magically back from the dead. I wonder if this is a Malory joke?

"Desdemona robbed of life or honour is nothing to a Mordred, robbed of himself—his soul stolen, overlaid, wizened, while the mother-character lives in triumph, superfluously and with stifling love endowed on him, seemingly innocent of ill-intention."

I don't want to dismiss T.H. White. I recognize how much there is to love throughout the Once and Future King. But have mercy, I can't surmount his mother-hatred.

"It is the mother’s not the lover’s lust that rots the mind. It is that which condemns the tragic character to his walking death. It is Jocasta, not Juliet, who dwells in the inner chamber. It is Gertrude, not the silly Ophelia, who sends Hamlet to his madness."

Sir, go to therapy.

"These [Cressida, Cleopatra, Delilah] are not the heart of tragedy. They are fripperies to the soul of man. What does it matter if Antony did fall upon his sword? It only killed him. It is the mother’s not the lover’s lust that rots the mind."

Freud would have a field day with White. The mommy-issues hits just keep coming.