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Nov. 29th, 2005 04:57 amIt was hell to write about but diving into "Triumph" so deeply was a great experience. I read it fast, read it slow while annotating each line, read it aloud to Julie (who it impressed-depressed), read it over and over again in pieces, then whole in Eurekavision, then in pieces in confusion. Eventually lost it, but there was a real communion there, or series of communions. I'm glad to find this English path has something to give. My paper, let it be noted, was crap and more abandoned than finished.
Proving I stopped learning lessons long ago, my overlong papers of this week will be a comparison of "Circe" and Peer Gynt, and something about To the Lighthouse--the latter two works being as much components of my heart as "Triumph". The lecturer who assigned Woolf at least seems to want a general discussion. He just likes talking about novels and their characters. Which makes him about the best of human beings, in my view.
To the Lighthouse I read over eleven years ago. It was my first term at college, surely a sublime agony for all but the most social. Somehow this makes me remember with complete vividness everything I read or did that season. Unless that's the eighteenness. I guess that whole year is still the center of me. Anyway, one of the great reading experiences of my life.
What were others? Hemingway's stories that December: I read through all of them while procrastinating apocalyptically. Oy, how little I've changed. Proust, of course. The Oxford Ibsen alone on the top floor of the library exhausted after swimming, nights and nights of that. Vidal's Essays, Angelou's autobiographies, Camus' The Fall. Samson Agonistes, aloud. The Metamorphosis, The Symposium. Not always the best books, strictly, but the best experiences, immersions in new oxygen. Best books? Anna Karenina, the first hundred pages in one hour. That book just flew in. The Prelude. So many more. I remember each exact edition, the look of the page, where I was, what I'd done that day, the mental structures and flavors.
I read Shelley across a year, yet have few place or other associations for his poems. Seem to remember the bedrooms I read Prometheus Unbound and Revolt of Islam in, but that's about it. Strange that that should be an exception. Text eating context I guess. I really do find my thoughts about his poems to be accompanied by a bright mental haze I have to sort of squint through. Characteristic of Shelley's or of love to excess, I wonder.
Apparently just about every book I read c. 17-19 amounted to a Great Experience, actually. But there's been one or two discoveries each year since: Crowley & Carson this year, Roth last year, Melville in 2003...Bishop in 2002 I believe. Authors where you didn't know it could be like that, starting each page; can't conceive of how it could be any other way, by each page's foot. I hope that never stops.
They say you remember uncompleted tasks most vividly, too. I do think about The Waves a lot. And Resurrection.
The first great one may have been A Tale of Two Cities, abridged. Fourteen and in tears, I wrote out a personal manifesto based on, I don't know, its moral inspiration. Totally chagrined when my mother found it under a piece of furniture a few months later. I wonder what I'd make of it now, that book?
Proving I stopped learning lessons long ago, my overlong papers of this week will be a comparison of "Circe" and Peer Gynt, and something about To the Lighthouse--the latter two works being as much components of my heart as "Triumph". The lecturer who assigned Woolf at least seems to want a general discussion. He just likes talking about novels and their characters. Which makes him about the best of human beings, in my view.
To the Lighthouse I read over eleven years ago. It was my first term at college, surely a sublime agony for all but the most social. Somehow this makes me remember with complete vividness everything I read or did that season. Unless that's the eighteenness. I guess that whole year is still the center of me. Anyway, one of the great reading experiences of my life.
What were others? Hemingway's stories that December: I read through all of them while procrastinating apocalyptically. Oy, how little I've changed. Proust, of course. The Oxford Ibsen alone on the top floor of the library exhausted after swimming, nights and nights of that. Vidal's Essays, Angelou's autobiographies, Camus' The Fall. Samson Agonistes, aloud. The Metamorphosis, The Symposium. Not always the best books, strictly, but the best experiences, immersions in new oxygen. Best books? Anna Karenina, the first hundred pages in one hour. That book just flew in. The Prelude. So many more. I remember each exact edition, the look of the page, where I was, what I'd done that day, the mental structures and flavors.
I read Shelley across a year, yet have few place or other associations for his poems. Seem to remember the bedrooms I read Prometheus Unbound and Revolt of Islam in, but that's about it. Strange that that should be an exception. Text eating context I guess. I really do find my thoughts about his poems to be accompanied by a bright mental haze I have to sort of squint through. Characteristic of Shelley's or of love to excess, I wonder.
Apparently just about every book I read c. 17-19 amounted to a Great Experience, actually. But there's been one or two discoveries each year since: Crowley & Carson this year, Roth last year, Melville in 2003...Bishop in 2002 I believe. Authors where you didn't know it could be like that, starting each page; can't conceive of how it could be any other way, by each page's foot. I hope that never stops.
They say you remember uncompleted tasks most vividly, too. I do think about The Waves a lot. And Resurrection.
The first great one may have been A Tale of Two Cities, abridged. Fourteen and in tears, I wrote out a personal manifesto based on, I don't know, its moral inspiration. Totally chagrined when my mother found it under a piece of furniture a few months later. I wonder what I'd make of it now, that book?
