John Crowley's LJ (RSS Feed)
08-10-2008, 01:14 AM
Just tell me to stop doing this and I will, but here are some more pages from my 1975 copybook, unedited:
Loud , heap miseries upon us yet entwine our hearts with laughters low!
--Finnegans Wake
Proverbially and by nature our peasants walk in their sleep, closely resembling fakirs in their froglike and renunciatory sterility.
-- Joyce, in class, as reported by Francini
I am sure I should find again what you call the Holy Spirit sitting in the inkwell and the perverse devil of my literary conscience sitting on the hump of my pen.
-- Joyce to his brother Stanislaus
(I was reading Leon Edel's biography of Joyce here. I like this last quote for reminding us of a no-longer-existent common thing: the hump of a pen, that cork binding around a dip pen's end just before the point.)
Clear, unscalable, ahead
Lie the Mountains of Instead
From whose cold, cascading streams
None may drink, except in dreams.
--W.H. Auden
I was turning the pages [of Orlando Furioso] that evening with the sense -- essential to the enjoyment of any classic -- of being entirely free from responsibility to pause for a second over anything that threatened the least sign of tedium.
--Anthony Powell
Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux.
Baudelaire
...what Tacitus describes [among the German tribes] is a primitive awe of women as uncanny and probably prophetic beings, which is as remote from our comprehension as the primitive reverence for lunacy or the primitive horror of twins...
-- C.S. Lewis
(Remote, anyway, from most of us, I understand.)
omnis ardentior amator propriae uxoris adulter est.
-- Peter Lombard
Climbing up, therefore, step by step to Him that made me, I will pass beyond this faculty of nature and come to the fields and wide pavilions of the Memory. [...] The fields, the caves, the dens of Memory cannot be counted; their fullness cannot be counted nor the kinds of things that fill them... I force my way in among them, even as far as my power reaches, and nowhere find an end.
-- Augustine, Coinfessio, X, xviii
Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep, wherein the dullness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odors; and though on the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.
--Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus
Browne was convinced that we can;t actually smell things in dreams: we can only conceive ourselves to be doing so, without any actual sensation. True for me; you?
The dignitary who lays the foundation stone will give it three taps with a silver hammer. The hammer is real, but is the blow?
-- E.H. Gombrich
For much imaginary work was there
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles' image stood his spear
Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind:
A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head
Stood for the whole to be imagined.
--Rape of Lucrece
This is ekphrasis or the description in verse of a picture or other work of art. I think it must have been quoted in Gombrich's Mimesisis, from which the preceding came too.
More to come. (Or not.)
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/94390.html)
Loud , heap miseries upon us yet entwine our hearts with laughters low!
--Finnegans Wake
Proverbially and by nature our peasants walk in their sleep, closely resembling fakirs in their froglike and renunciatory sterility.
-- Joyce, in class, as reported by Francini
I am sure I should find again what you call the Holy Spirit sitting in the inkwell and the perverse devil of my literary conscience sitting on the hump of my pen.
-- Joyce to his brother Stanislaus
(I was reading Leon Edel's biography of Joyce here. I like this last quote for reminding us of a no-longer-existent common thing: the hump of a pen, that cork binding around a dip pen's end just before the point.)
Clear, unscalable, ahead
Lie the Mountains of Instead
From whose cold, cascading streams
None may drink, except in dreams.
--W.H. Auden
I was turning the pages [of Orlando Furioso] that evening with the sense -- essential to the enjoyment of any classic -- of being entirely free from responsibility to pause for a second over anything that threatened the least sign of tedium.
--Anthony Powell
Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux.
Baudelaire
...what Tacitus describes [among the German tribes] is a primitive awe of women as uncanny and probably prophetic beings, which is as remote from our comprehension as the primitive reverence for lunacy or the primitive horror of twins...
-- C.S. Lewis
(Remote, anyway, from most of us, I understand.)
omnis ardentior amator propriae uxoris adulter est.
-- Peter Lombard
Climbing up, therefore, step by step to Him that made me, I will pass beyond this faculty of nature and come to the fields and wide pavilions of the Memory. [...] The fields, the caves, the dens of Memory cannot be counted; their fullness cannot be counted nor the kinds of things that fill them... I force my way in among them, even as far as my power reaches, and nowhere find an end.
-- Augustine, Coinfessio, X, xviii
Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep, wherein the dullness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odors; and though on the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.
--Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus
Browne was convinced that we can;t actually smell things in dreams: we can only conceive ourselves to be doing so, without any actual sensation. True for me; you?
The dignitary who lays the foundation stone will give it three taps with a silver hammer. The hammer is real, but is the blow?
-- E.H. Gombrich
For much imaginary work was there
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles' image stood his spear
Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind:
A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head
Stood for the whole to be imagined.
--Rape of Lucrece
This is ekphrasis or the description in verse of a picture or other work of art. I think it must have been quoted in Gombrich's Mimesisis, from which the preceding came too.
More to come. (Or not.)
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/94390.html)