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Sep. 15th, 2012 03:57 amProgressing alphabetically from Woolf's but-after-all to Wordsworth's nor-need-I.
I wrote an undergraduate paper on the curiously self-conscious desperate ring, in Tintern, to all his self-consolations for everything running on and out. But as you can maybe see better in The Prelude, I think he was instead trying to highlight each part of an overflowing bouquet of blessings - bursting each last one like a ballon twisted into an air castle to make it clearer that we could still live in the least of these castles. We're redundantly saved.
Of course the need to point out that we're redundantly saved bespeaks desperation, you know, nearby - what drove the search, is being overprotested against by such multiplex hopes, will be fallen back into after the last-expired salvation. But Wordsworth isn't desperate in his tone, and even the breathlessly improvised quality to his consoling is much more that of a child at a bountiful Christmas than of a last ditch confabulator. It's usually flowing airs, inside and out, that Wordsworth discovers - each wind its own windfall. You wonder if he started with acutely low expectations, that he should be so freshly surprised at each delight. I guess missing both parents might have something to do with that, and the deists' convincing purgation of God from the visible.
Maybe it's that I'm reading him through Woolf? I liked best the first time I read Dalloway, as I think many do, how unexpectedly encouraged she is by the young man who killed himself - what's worthy in life is fragile, but therefore real, a substance you can acquire a lot of if you're lucky, and know most to value when you realize how easily that luck could change. If there's a point where life is worth losing there's a point where it's worth having - the matter isn't merely interpretation, merely words. Though words, interpretation are involved. But that justifies them. There's a world blows through our words that those words blow through.
I wrote an undergraduate paper on the curiously self-conscious desperate ring, in Tintern, to all his self-consolations for everything running on and out. But as you can maybe see better in The Prelude, I think he was instead trying to highlight each part of an overflowing bouquet of blessings - bursting each last one like a ballon twisted into an air castle to make it clearer that we could still live in the least of these castles. We're redundantly saved.
Of course the need to point out that we're redundantly saved bespeaks desperation, you know, nearby - what drove the search, is being overprotested against by such multiplex hopes, will be fallen back into after the last-expired salvation. But Wordsworth isn't desperate in his tone, and even the breathlessly improvised quality to his consoling is much more that of a child at a bountiful Christmas than of a last ditch confabulator. It's usually flowing airs, inside and out, that Wordsworth discovers - each wind its own windfall. You wonder if he started with acutely low expectations, that he should be so freshly surprised at each delight. I guess missing both parents might have something to do with that, and the deists' convincing purgation of God from the visible.
Maybe it's that I'm reading him through Woolf? I liked best the first time I read Dalloway, as I think many do, how unexpectedly encouraged she is by the young man who killed himself - what's worthy in life is fragile, but therefore real, a substance you can acquire a lot of if you're lucky, and know most to value when you realize how easily that luck could change. If there's a point where life is worth losing there's a point where it's worth having - the matter isn't merely interpretation, merely words. Though words, interpretation are involved. But that justifies them. There's a world blows through our words that those words blow through.
