Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Theme Analysis
Brave New World presents a startling view of the future which on the surface appears almost comical. Yet humor was not the intention of Aldous Huxley when he wrote the book in the early 1930’s. Indeed Huxley’s real message is very dark. His idea that in centuries to come, a one-world government will rise to power, stripping people’s freedom, is not new. In fact there are hosts of books dedicated to this topic. What makes Huxley’s interpretation different is the fact that his fictional society not only lives in this totalitarian government, but embraces it like mindless robots.
Soma, not nuclear bombs, is the weapon of choice for the World Controllers in Brave New World. These men have realized that fear and intimidation have only limited power; after all, these tactics simply build up resentment in the minds of the oppressed. Subconscious persuasion and mind-altering drugs, on the other hand, appear to have no side effects. Add to this the method of genetic engineering, and soon almost all “pre-Ford” problems have been wiped out permanently.
The caste system of this brave new world is equally ingenious. Free from the burdens and tensions of a capitalistic system which separates people into social classes by natural selection, this dictatorship government is only required to determine the correct number of Alphas, Betas, etc., all the way down the totem pole. There is no class warfare because greed, the basic ingredient of capitalism, has been eliminated. Even Deltas and Epsilons are content to do their manual labor. This contentment arises both from the genetic engineering and the extensive conditioning each individual goes through in childhood.
Freedom (as well as art and religion which are results of freedom) in this society has been sacrificed for what Mustapha Mond calls happiness. Indeed almost all of Huxley’s characters, save Bernard and the Savage, are content to take their soma ration, go to the feelies (the superficial substitute for actual life), and live their mindless, grey lives. The overwhelming color throughout Brave New World is grey. Everything and everyone seems dull to the reader, except perhaps the Savage, who is the only bright color in the novel. This grey happiness is the ultimate goal of the World Controllers like Mond.
Yet Mond has incorrectly associated lack of pain with happiness. Only the Savage knows that true happiness comes from the knowledge that one has value. He alludes to this when he describes his childhood in the Reservation where the only time he was happy was after he had completed a project with his own two hands. This, not soma, gave him the self-confidence to find happiness. The Savage knows his own value is as an individual, not a member of a collective.
Other characters in Brave New World, however, have no concept of self-worth. This results in their inability to find the happiness known to the Savage and the rest of the pre-Ford world which lives in the Reservation. True happiness is a consequence of freedom, not slavery. No slave can experience happiness until he is free. Yes, any slave can experience the contentment of a full belly and a full supply of instant gratification, but this doesn’t lead to happiness.
Bernard suffers throughout the book, being caught between both worlds. Although he has been conditioned to accept his servitude, he is constantly longing for freedom. He sees this freedom in the Savage, and envies him for possessing the inner happiness— genuine happiness— which Bernard’s society outlaws. Huxley uses Bernard to exemplify this struggle between freedom and slavery. Huxley argues that a genuine, free life requires suffering and pain. Men without anguish are men without souls. Huxley’s future describes a world without pain and a world without soul.
From http://www.novelguide.com/bravenewworld/themeanalysis.html
Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre
Nausea (1964)
Written just after the devastating Spanish Civil War and published right before the outbreak of World War II, Nausea addressed and anticipated the themes of anguish and despair that would come to define the horrors of the twentieth century. Sartre used the novel to expose the bare existence of objects and people. The novel’s protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, is horrified to first confront the overwhelming existence of both objects and himself (instead of their essences) and then discover that there is to purpose to existence. Instead, he finds only nothingness: a vacuum filled by questions of free will, self-deception, and responsibility that still influence approaches to art and philosophy today.
From the back cover:
Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, critic, novelist and dramatist, hold a position of singular eminence in the world of French letters. Among readers and critics familiar with the whole of Sartre’s work, it is generally recognized that his earliest novel, Le Nausée (first published in 1938), is his finest and most significant. It is unquestionably a key novel of the Twentieth Century and a landmark in Existentialist fiction.
Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation about the world and people around him. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which “spread at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time—the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.” Roquentin’s efforts to come to terms with his life, his philosophical and psychological struggles, give Sartre the opportunity to dramatize trhe tents of his Existentialist creed.
Requiem for a Dreamer
Culture > October 15, 2004
Requiem for a Dreamer
By Kurt Vonnegut
Editor’s note: What follows is a conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and out-of-print science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. It was to be their last. Trout committed suicide by drinking Drano at midnight on October 15 in Cohoes, New York, after a female psychic using tarot cards predicted that the environmental calamity George W. Bush would once again be elected president of the most powerful nation on the planet by a five-to-four decision of the Supreme Court, which included “100 per-cent of the black vote.”
TROUT: I’ve never voted in my whole damn life. I didn’t want to be complicit. But is it time I did?
KV: The planet’s immune system is obviously trying to get rid of us, and high time! But sure, go vote for somebody. What the hell.
TROUT: Everybody’s so ignorant.
KV: The overwhelming popularity of President Bush, in spite of everything, finally shows us what the American people, whom we have so sentimentalized for so long, a la Norman Rockwell, really are, thanks to TV and purposely lousy public schools: ignorant. Count on it!
TROUT: You ever meet anybody who was really smart?
KV: Only one: Saul Steinberg, the graphic artist who’s dead now. Everybody I know is dead now, present company excepted. I could ask Saul anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer. He growled a perfect answer. He was born in Rumania, and, according to him, he was born into a house where “the geese peeked in the windows.”
TROUT: Like what kind of questions?
KV: I said, “Saul, what should I think about Picasso?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “God put him on Earth to show us what it’s like to be really rich.” I said, “Saul, I’m a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists, but I can’t help feeling that some of them are in a very different business from mine, even though I like their books a lot. What would make me feel that way?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “It is very simple: There are two kinds of artists, and one is not superior to the other. But one kind responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.”
I said, “Saul, are you gifted?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “No. But what we respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.”
TROUT: OK.
KV: You seem unimpressed.
TROUT: I said, “OK.”
KV: You said it so emptily.
TROUT: Sorry. You know me: Always running on empty.
KV: Somebody else smart? OK, try this: After the Second World War I enrolled in the graduate division of the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago, the most conceited university in the country. And in a seminar for about eight of us, half of us vets on the GI Bill of Rights, my favorite professor, in fact my thesis advisor, put this Socratic question to us: “What is it an artist does?”
TROUT: Hold on: What makes Chicago so conceited?
KV: That it isn’t Harvard.
TROUT: Got it: That it isn’t high society.
KV: Bingo. Anyway, I’m sure we all came up with smart-ass answers, since a graduate seminar in any subject is a form of improv theater. But the only answer I remember is the one he gave: “An artist says, ‘I can’t do anything about the chaos in the universe or my country, or even in my own miserable life, but I can at least make this piece of paper or canvas, or blob of clay or chunk of marble, exactly what it should be.’”
TROUT: OK.
KV: Did you forget to take your Viagra today?
TROUT: Very funny. But what he said an artist does is what I do every time I brush my teeth or tie my shoes. You thought this guy was smart? He’s an asshole.
KV: Look, when you put a piece of paper in your typewriter, don’t you try to make it exactly what it should be?
TROUT: No, I just effing write.
KV: What are you effing writing now?
TROUT: It’s about how the future has as much to do with the present as the past does. Giraffes can only have come from the future. There’s no way evolution in the past would have let something that defenseless and impractical live for 15 minutes.
KV: If you say so.
TROUT: Try this: The First World War was caused by the second one. Otherwise the first one makes no sense, wasn’t about anything. And all Picasso had to do was paint pictures that were already hanging in museums in the future.
KV: OK.
TROUT: Just trying to be Einstein. You never know. But hey, the two people you said were so smart were both men. Women say smart things, too. I went walking with a woman the other day, if you can believe it, and I stopped to retie my shoes, and she said, “Every time I go for a walk with a man he always has to stop to retie his shoes. Why won’t men tie double knots? A fear of commitment?” How’s that for anthropology, the science of man? I’ll bet they didn’t teach you about men and shoelaces at Chicago.
KV: That isn’t anthropology. That’s sociology.
TROUT: What’s the difference? I’ve often wondered.
KV: A sociologist is paid by the Sociology Department. An anthropologist is paid by the Anthropology Department.
TROUT: Glad to have that cleared up.
KV: Knowledge is power.
TROUT: Well, I’m off. Ciao, adios and aloha.
KV: Whither bound?
TROUT: Back to Cohoes for an AA meeting.
KV: But you’re not an alcoholic.
TROUT: It’s the only place I can pick up women. They have their defenses down. “Hello, I’m Kilgore Trout and I’m an alcoholic.” And I’ve met this babe named Flamingo who is a professional psychic. She’s going to tell me our country’s fortune. Who’ll win the next election.
KV: OK
TROUT: Take care.
KV: You too.
Kilgore Trout
Who is Kilgore Trout?
"Yeah. In fact, it said so in his obituary in the [New York] Times... Sturgeon got a nice big obituary in the Times.... I was delighted that it said in the middle of it that he was the inspiration for the Kurt Vonnegut character of Kilgore Trout."
For more visit: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/trout.html
Original Kilgore Trout Stories:
From: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
New York: November 1978; Dell Publishing Co.
Trout’s favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved. In 2BR0TB he hypothecated an America in which almost all of the work was done by machines, and the only people who could get work had three or more Ph.D’s. There was a serious overpopulation problem, too.
. . .
Slaughterhouse-Five
New York: October 1971; Dell Publishing Co.
Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension
. . . It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.
Breakfast of Champions
London: 1988; Cox & Wyman Ltd.
The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto (or This Year’s Masterpiece)
New York: August 1988; Dell Publishing Co.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A great thinker who struggled with his personal demons.
One of the most influential and controversial figures of the Romantic period, Coleridge was born in 1772 the son of a clergyman in Ottery St. Mary, Devon.
His career as a poet and writer were established after he befriended Wordsworth and together they produced the Lyrical Ballads in 1798.
For most of his adult life he suffered through addiction to laudanum and opium. His most famous works – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel – all took supernatural themes and presented exotic images, perhaps affected by his use of the drugs.
Coleridge was as much a prose and theoretical writer as he was a poet, as revealed in his major work, Biographia Literaria, published in 1817.
Coleridge’s legacy has been tainted with accusations of plagiarism, both in his poetry and critical essays; he had a propensity for leaving projects unfinished and suffered from large debts. But, such was the originality of his early work, that his place and influence within the Romantic period is undisputed.
bio from http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/coleridge.shtml
Poems
Frost at Midnight
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud–and hark, again ! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings : save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
‘Tis calm indeed ! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village ! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams ! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.
But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful ! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes ! For I was reared
In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe ! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags : so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher ! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
Kubla Khan
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
John Keats (1795-1821)
John Keats
Keats’ life was cut short due to ill health but his poems have stood the test of time, even if he didn’t believe they would.
Keats is the tragic figure of the Romantic movement who died young, but during his brief life he created some of the best known and enduring poetry of the 19th century.
Born in London in 1795 Keats pursued a medical career as an apprentice surgeon but gave up the practice shortly after performing his first operation in 1816, an experience that affected him profoundly.
His friendship with editor Leigh Hunt and his literary circle of friends encouraged Keats to write poetry. He suffered much criticism after his first major effort, Endymion, which was published in 1818, but Keats continued to write and examined his work more closely. Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, published in 1820, is widely regarded as some of the best poetry to have been written during the period.
But in 1820 the first signs of consumption occurred. Despite moving to Italy to try and improve his condition Keats knew from his own medical training that his cause was lost. He died in Rome in 1821 at the tender age of 25. Keats wrote his own epitaph, which describes his belief that he would not be remembered: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”.
His death was to influence Shelley in particular, who wrote the poem Adonais in his honour and attacked critics for their harsh treatment of Keats’ early work.
Bio from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/keats.shtml
Poems
Ode To A Nightingale
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?
Ode On A Grecian Urn
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Ode to Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cell.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;–then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on 16 October 1854 in Dublin. He would later assert that a name which is destined to be in everyone’s mouth must not be too long. All the world would come to know him simply as Oscar Wilde.
Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and later at Oxford–where he discovered the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others. While at Oxford he fell under the influence of Walter Pater and the doctrine of art for art’s sake. And in 1879, he established himself as the leader and model of the aesthetic movement.
He wore velvet coats with contrasting braid, knee britches, loose-fitting wide-collared shirts with flowing ties and lavender-colored gloves. He frequently carried a jewel-topped cane and was caricatured in the press flamboyantly attired and bearing an over-sized sunflower–an icon of the movement.
On the heels of the success and titillating scandal of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Mr. Wilde produced his best known plays. Among these timeless social comedies were: Lady Windemere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), Salome (1893), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and An Ideal Husband (1895). They were well received by the public and Mr. Wilde became the toast of London society–lionized for his brilliant wit, his gregarious charm and manner.
Although married and the father of two children, Wilde’s personal life was open to rumours. His years of triumph ended dramatically, when his intimate association with Alfred Douglas led to his trial on charges of homosexuality (then illegal in Britain). He was imprisoned for homosexual acts in 1895 and went bankrupt before he left prison, and had to sell his house and possession to pay his debts.
Wilde died in 1900, broke in Paris at the age of 46, but his name is still synonymous with the bohemian lifestyle, wit and comic theatre.
More on Oscar Wilde:http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/
Picture of Dorian Gray
Though he wrote many plays, short stories and poems, Oscar Wilde only wrote one novel. The Picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of a young man named Dorian Gray, who is the subject of a painting by the artist Basil Hallward. Dorian is selected for his remarkable physical beauty, and Basil becomes somewhat infatuated with Dorian, believing that his beauty is responsible for a new mode of art. Talking in Basil’s garden, Dorian meets and speaks with Lord Henry Wootton, a friend of Basil’s, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry’s world view. Espousing a new kind of hedonism, Lord Henry suggests that the only thing worth pursuing in life is beauty, and the fulfillment of the senses. Upon realising that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, wishing that the portrait Basil has painted of him would age rather than himself. Dorian’s wish is fulfilled, plunging him into more and more debaucherous acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, each sin being displayed as a new sign of ageing on the portrait.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered a work of gothic horror fiction with a strong Faustian theme.It also deals with the artistic movement of the decadents, and pederasty, both of which caused some controversy when the book was first published. However, in modern times, the book has been referred to as “one of the modern classics of Western literature.”The BBC placed it at #118 in its “Big Read” list, a list of of the 200 most popular novels.
The Preface
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies.
An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.
From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
Quotes from the book
“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.” Chapter 1, pg. 3
“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that-for that-I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” Chapter 2, pg. 29
“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.” Chapter 3, pg. 46
“My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mid, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.” Chapter 4, pg. 53
“I hope that Dorian Gray will make this woman his wife, passionately adore her for six months, and then suddenly become fascinated by someone else. He would be a wonderful study.” Chapter 6, pg. 84
“If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. This marriage is quite right. I did not think so at first, but I admit it now. The gods made Sibyl Vane for you. Without her you are incomplete.” Chapter 7, pg. 92
“You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realised the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid.” Chapter 7, pg. 98
“His unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of God to us all. There were opiates for remorse, drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep. But here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls.” Chapter 8, pg. 108
“For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul.” Chapter 8, pg. 120
“How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played– the night you saw her–she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art.” Chapter 9
“Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour–that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.” Chapter 9
The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner.
“It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.” Chapter 10
“Yes, there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life, and to save from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival.” Chapter 11, pg. 147
“What a way for a fashionable painter to travel! A Gladstone bag and an ulster! Come in, or the fog will get into the house. And mind you don’t talk about anything serious. Nothing is serious nowadays. At least nothing should be.” Chapter 12
“He held the light up again to the canvas and examined it. The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed and as he had left it. It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.” Chapter 13
” Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent, blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness.” Chapter 14
“‘It is perfectly monstrous,’ he said, at last,’the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.’” Chapter 15
“‘To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.’ Yes, that was the secret. He had often tried it, and would try it again now. There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.” Chapter 16
“Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.” Chapter 17, pg. 223
“Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on purpose, how interesting he would be! I should like to know someone who had committed a real murder.” Chapter 18, pg. 233
“anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.” Chapter 19
“The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.” Chapter 19
“The picture itself– that was evidence. He would destroy it. Why had he kept it so long? Once it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old. Of late he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night. When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.” Chapter 20
The End.
Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678)
From 1659 until his death, Marvell was a conscientious member of Parliament, answering letters from his constituents and going on two diplomatic missions, one to Holland and the other to Russia. He also wrote prose satires (anonymously, of course) criticizing the monarchy and Catholicism, defending Puritan dissenters, and denouncing censorship. In 1967 he became John Milton’s assistant. His poetry is usually associated with Donne’s and George Herbert’s. And his poem “To His Coy Mistress” has been one of the most discussed in all of English literature.
for more on Marvell visit: http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Andrew_Marvell
To his Coy Mistress
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
A Diaologue Between The Soul And The Body
Soul
O Who shall, from this Dungeon, raise
A Soul inslav’d so many wayes?
With bolts of Bones, that fetter’d stands
In Feet ; and manacled in Hands.
Here blinded with an Eye ; and there
Deaf with the drumming of an Ear.
A Soul hung up, as ’twere, in Chains
Of Nerves, and Arteries, and Veins.
Tortur’d, besides each other part,
In a vain Head, and double Heart.
Body
O who shall me deliver whole,
From bonds of this Tyrannic Soul?
Which, stretcht upright, impales me so,
That mine own Precipice I go;
And warms and moves this needless Frame:
(A Fever could but do the same.)
And, wanting where its spight to try,
Has made me live to let me dye.
A Body that could never rest,
Since this ill Spirit it possest.
Soul
What Magic could me thus confine
Within anothers Grief to pine?
Where whatsoever it complain,
I feel, that cannot feel, the pain.
And all my Care its self employes,
That to preserve, which me destroys:
Constrain’d not only to indure
Diseases,but, whats worse, the Cure:
And ready oft the Port to gain,
Am Shipwrackt into Health again.
Body
But Physick yet could never reach
The Maladies Thou me dost teach;
Whom first the Cramp of Hope does Tear:
And then the Palsie Shakes of Fear.
The Pestilence of Love does heat:
Or Hatred’s hidden Ulcer eat.
Joy’s chearful Madness does perplex:
Or Sorrow’s other Madness vex.
Which Knowledge forces me to know;
And Memory will not foregoe.
What but a Soul could have the wit
To build me up for Sin so fit?
So Architects do square and hew,
Green Trees that in the Forest grew.
On Mr.Milton’s Paradise lost.
When I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold,
In slender Book his vast Design unfold,
Messiah Crown’d, Gods Reconcil’d Decree,
Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,
Heav’n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All; the Argument
Held me a while misdoubting his Intent,
That he would ruine (for I saw him strong)
The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song,
(So Sampson groap’d the Temples Posts in spight)
The World o’rewhelming to revenge his Sight.
Yet as I read, soon growing less severe,
I lik’d his Project, the success did fear;
Through that wide Field how he his way should find
O’re which lame Faith leads Understanding blind;
Lest he perplext the things he would explain,
And what was easie he should render vain.
Or if a Work so infinite he spann’d,
Jealous I was that some less skilful hand
(Such as disquiet alwayes what is well,
And by ill imitating would excell)
Might hence presume the whole Creations day
To change in Scenes, and show it in a Play.
Pardon me, Mighty Poet, nor despise
My causeless, yet not impious, surmise.
But I am now convinc’d, and none will dare
Within thy Labours to pretend a Share.
Thou hast not miss’d one thought that could be fit,
And all that was improper dost omit:
So that no room is here for Writers left,
But to detect their Ignorance or Theft.
That Majesty which through thy Work doth Reign
Draws the Devout, deterring the Profane.
And things divine thou treats of in such state
As them preserves, and Thee in violate.
At once delight and horrour on us seize,
Thou singst with so much gravity and ease;
And above humane flight dost soar aloft,
With Plume so strong, so equal, and so soft.
The Bird nam’d from that Paradise you sing
So never Flags, but alwaies keeps on Wing.
Where couldst thou Words of such a compass find?
Whence furnish such a vast expense of Mind?
Just Heav’n Thee, like Tiresias, to requite,
Rewards with Prophesie thy loss of Sight.
Well might thou scorn thy Readers to allure
With tinkling Rhime, of thy own Sense secure;
While the Town-Bays writes all the while and spells,
And like a Pack-Horse tires without his Bells.
Their Fancies like our bushy Points appear,
The Poets tag them; we for fashion wear.
I too transported by the Mode offend,
And while I meant to Praise thee, must Commend.
Thy verse created like thy Theme sublime,
In Number, Weight, and Measure, needs not Rhime.
John Donne (1572-1631)
John Donne (1572-1631) is perhaps the most important poet of the seventeenth century. In his day it seemed to his admirers that Donne had changed the literary universe, and he is now widely regarded as the founder of the metaphysical `school’.Donne’s poetry is highly distinctive and individual, adopting a multitude of rhythms, images, forms, and personae, from irresistible seducer to devout believer. His greatness stems from the subtleties and ambivalences of tone that convey his remarkably modern awareness of the instability of the self.
- Oxford World’s Classics
For more on Donne visit: http://www.online-literature.com/donne/
Here are some of my favorite works of this poetic genius:
A LECTURE UPON THE SHADOW.
STAND still, and I will read to thee
A lecture, Love, in Love’s philosophy.
These three hours that we have spent,
Walking here, two shadows went
Along with us, which we ourselves produced.
But, now the sun is just above our head,
We do those shadows tread,
And to brave clearness all things are reduced.
So whilst our infant loves did grow,
Disguises did, and shadows, flow
From us and our cares ; but now ’tis not so.
That love hath not attain’d the highest degree,
Which is still diligent lest others see.
Except our loves at this noon stay,
We shall new shadows make the other way.
As the first were made to blind
Others, these which come behind
Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.
If our loves faint, and westerwardly decline,
To me thou, falsely, thine
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.
The morning shadows wear away,
But these grow longer all the day ;
But O ! love’s day is short, if love decay.
Love is a growing, or full constant light,
And his short minute, after noon, is night.
THE BROKEN HEART.
He is stark mad, whoever says,
That he hath been in love an hour,
Yet not that love so soon decays,
But that it can ten in less space devour ;
Who will believe me, if I swear
That I have had the plague a year?
Who would not laugh at me, if I should say
I saw a flash of powder burn a day?
Ah, what a trifle is a heart,
If once into love’s hands it come !
All other griefs allow a part
To other griefs, and ask themselves but some ;
They come to us, but us love draws ;
He swallows us and never chaws ;
By him, as by chain’d shot, whole ranks do die ;
He is the tyrant pike, our hearts the fry.
If ’twere not so, what did become
Of my heart when I first saw thee?
I brought a heart into the room,
But from the room I carried none with me.
If it had gone to thee, I know
Mine would have taught thine heart to show
More pity unto me ; but Love, alas !
At one first blow did shiver it as glass.
Yet nothing can to nothing fall,
Nor any place be empty quite ;
Therefore I think my breast hath all
Those pieces still, though they be not unite ;
And now, as broken glasses show
A hundred lesser faces, so
My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore,
But after one such love, can love no more.
A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls, to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
“The breath goes now,” and some say, “No:”
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears;
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refin’d,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the’ other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.
THE FLEA.
MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.
O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloister’d in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck’d from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou
Find’st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
‘Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;
Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.
ELEGY XX
To his mistress going to bed
Come, Madame, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times, having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing, though they never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glistering
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate, which you wear
That the eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now ’tis your bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals
As when from flowery meads the hill’s shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow;
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love’s hallowed temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven’s angels used to be
Received by men; thou angel bringst with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these Angels from an evil sprite:
They set our hairs, but these the flesh upright.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds is to be free,
Then where my hand is set my seal shall be.
Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s balls, cast in men’s views,
That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus arrayed;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
Whom their imputed grace will dignify
Must see revealed. Then since I may know,
As liberally as to a midwife show
Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
Here is no penance, much less innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first, why then
What needst thou have more covering than a man.
Transition period (Donne decides he wants to give away with seducing women, and chooses to devote his life to God):
HOLY SONNETS.
XIV.
Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
HOLY SONNETS.
X.
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so ;
For those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy picture[s] be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou’rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke ; why swell’st thou then ?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more ; Death, thou shalt die.
He did meditations too:
MEDITATION XVII.
PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another’s danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.
Neil Gaiman
I’m not very into fantasy books, but someone from my english class a few semesters ago highly recomended that I read a book entitled Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I thought it was an intresting title, so I decided to give it a try. I’m very happy I did. I was not at all what I expected. I was expecting fairies and wizards, and instead I was presented with a story full of magical imagery, in an adventure exploring all the souls who get lost between the cracks. I was very impressed, and went out and bought two more of his books, which I was also just as pleased with.
More About Neil: Bestselling author Neil Gaiman has long been one of the top writers in modern comics, as well as writing books for readers of all ages. He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers, and is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama. f
For more visit: http://www.neilgaiman.com
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancee. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her–and the life he knows vanishes like smoke.
Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won’t stop for him, his hundred rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.
For this is the home of Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in the London Above. A personage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit realm, she is on a mission to discover the cause of her family’s slaughter, and in doing so preserve this strange underworld kingdom from the malevolence that means to destroy it. And with nowhere else to turn, Richard Mayhew must now join the Lady Door’s entourage in their determined–and possibly fatal–quest.
For the dread journey ever-downward–through bizarre anachronisms and dangerous incongruities, and into dusty corners of stalled time–is Richard’s final hope, his last road back to a “real” world that is growing disturbingly less real by the minute.
If Tim Burton reimagined The Phantom of the Opera, if Jack Finney let his dark side take over, if you rolled the best work of Clive Barker, Peter Straub and Caleb Carr into one, you still would have something that fell far short of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. It is a masterful debut novel of darkly hypnotic power, and one of the most absorbing reads to come along in years.
from http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/books/neverwhere
American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
Released from prison, Shadow finds his world turned upside down. His wife has been killed; a mysterious stranger offers him a job. But Mr. Wednesday, who knows more about Shadow than is possible, warns that a storm is coming — a battle for the very soul of America . . . and they are in its direct path.
One of the most talked-about books of the new millennium, American Gods is a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an American landscape at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. It is, quite simply, a contemporary masterpiece.
Hugo Award for Best SF/Fantasy Novel, Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel, Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, Nebula Award for Best Novel
Critical Praise:
- “Mystery, satire, sex, horror, poetic prose – American Gods uses all these to keep the reader turning the pages.” –Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
- “A fascinating tale . . . by turns thoughtful, hilarious, disturbing, uplifting, horrifying and enjoyable — and sometimes all at once, in a curious sort of way. Those who are familiar with Gaiman’s earlier work will find a satisfying yarn by a familiar master storyteller. Those who are meeting him for the first time may be surprised at just how good he is.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch
- “Saying Neil Gaiman is a writer is like saying Da Vinci dabbled in the arts.” –Minneapolis Star Tribune
- ” A crackerjack suspense yarn . . . juicily original . . . Wagnerian noir.” –Salon.com
- “American Gods is sexy, thrilling, dark, funny and poetic.” –Teller, of Penn & Teller
- “Here we have . . . a real emotional richness and grandeur that emerge from masterful storytelling.” –Peter Straub
- “Neil Gaiman, a writer of rare perception and endless imagination . . . is . . . an American treasure.” –William Gibson
Anansi Boys
When Fat Charlie’s dad named something, it stuck. Like calling Fat Charlie “Fat Charlie.” Even now, twenty years later, Charlie Nancy can’t shake that name, one of the many embarrassing “gifts” his father bestowed — before he dropped dead on a karaoke stage and ruined Fat Charlie’s life.
Mr. Nancy left Fat Charlie things. Things like the tall, good-looking stranger who appears on Charlie’s doorstep, who appears to be the brother he never knew. A brother as different from Charlie as night is from day, a brother who’s going to show Charlie how to lighten up and have a little fun … just like Dear Old Dad. And all of a sudden, life starts getting very interesting for Fat Charlie.
Because, you see, Charlie’s dad wasn’t just any dad. He was Anansi, a trickster god, the spider-god. Anansi is the spirit of rebellion, able to overturn the social order, create wealth out of thin air, and baffle the devil. Some said he could cheat even Death himself.
Returning to the territory he so brilliantly explored in his masterful New York Times bestseller, American Gods, the incomparable Neil Gaiman offers up a work of dazzling ingenuity, a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth that is at once startling, terrifying, exhilarating, and fiercely funny — a true wonder of a novel that confirms Stephen King’s glowing assessment of the author as “a treasure-house of story, and we are lucky to have him.
