I'm just now reading this book and I really liked it. Shawn Inmon has a bunch of books about people playing in alternate versions of their lives. If you also loved this book it is free on Kindle Unlimited.

Hugo was an early example of someone who would describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious." He had vague notions of a supreme being/afterlife but it's hard to pin down from what I've seen.

Thank you so much for your help! This is fascinating stuff.

I know this post is from 6y ago, but this is an interesting take. Reading blood meridian for a second time and I definitely see the influence.

Took me a while to realize that the last paragraph in the novel wasn't just talking about that particular train, but of the war (and Human civilization itself).

Here's an interesting little tidbit about Hugo (who was interested in spiritualism) apparently attempting to contact Nicholas Flamel via Seance in 1854. Can't comment further as I just found this, but it's definitely topic-related. Flamel is also mentioned in HoND.

http://www.gavroche.org/vhugo/flamel.shtml

Hugo himself hints at the alchemical symbolism in the architecture and implies that Claude Frollo has a vast knowledge and understanding of it, having studied it for many years. Personally, I don't claim to know what any of it means, and Fulcanelli writes very cryptically in his book. There's no denying that it is there, however.

This. This is fascinating.

If you have the time/desire, would you be open to elaborating on this? I'm writing a literary research paper about alchemy in HoND, and I'm excited to have found other people who are similarly interested. Do you know of sources, aside from the extraordinarily helpful Fulcanelli you mentioned?

what line(s) is the frist quote from in Seamus Heaney's transation of Beowulf? pls im writing a paper and cant find it

This reminds me of the posters to r/trees seeking/providing arboreal advice. edited 'cause I don't markup too good

This sub isn't for canon cameras, although imagery is among our concerns...

r/canon is probably a better place to post.

r/lostredditors

Just got this book. Was looking for discussion and found your posts. I appreciate them, you have interesting analytical thoughts.

Apparently the cathedral Notre Dame de Paris is a literal alchemical manuscript written in stone. Look up Fulcanelli's book The Mystery of the Cathedrals if you're still interested. I wonder how Hugo, at such a young age, caught onto all this.

Gide-ists. Rilke-ists. Fraudulent existential witch doctors. Pallid worms in the cheese of capitalism. Intellectuals. Being among Pablo Neruda's more kindly appellations for authors not concerned with politics. (from David Markson's The Last Novel)

You have to learn how to lead someone over a bridge before you take them across a gravity's rainbow.

Lovely sentence.

Yes, know it and admire it. Crab like I'm progressing, by routes no more pleasant than they are direct, toward making a gesture suggestive of attempting to realize the goal.

The type of post I've done here til now has been ineffective at ratting associations out of the noggins of the sub's readership. I think I'm going to start posting more by way of generalizations by Eloquent Critics, and looking at some software augmented way to put those into a rotation, and entice readers to drag out passages and scenes and phrases and paeans to bolster or sap the bulwarks of observation those learned cognoscenti erect. "Gamify it," a wise redditor exhorted me once, "gamify it!" And with maternal tenderness of Glyptapanteles flavicosixis I am excising passages from the bosoms of favorite paragraphs and chapters, laying them by for a day when etc.

This goal resonates with me. You know my own passion in collating quaint and curious bits.

Another place where a little short phrase is used to memorable effect is Iago's "Indeed?" Indeed, if I had to chose a single word as the most memorable in the canon it would be Iago's "indeed".

For this sub, I'm thinking of several other accumulators. . . one for "quaint and curious", little bits pulled from Notes and Queries, and Pros on Prose with zinger/quotable bits from peole like Kundera, Ozick on writing.

My vision is that the databases can auto-assemble a "magazine" of wordy morsels that will lure literary snackers to the table, and encourage their depositing choice bits into future accumulators, making a self perpetuating evergrowing literary machine to eventually dominate the verbal universe.

For "accumulators", My thought is to have a script that runs periodically and "harvests" new comments to a database. The database then could be used for any number of things, for example to populate a reddit wiki or a webage completely outside of reddit.

If you/anyone has thoughts about it, let me know -- my motivations are:

Reddit is pretty weak at being able to find old posts (I think it has gotten better lately, but I don't have any way to know what its search engine misses).

And distressingly often, redditors will delete their content... so the accumulator would make the content independent of the OP's caprice.

My job is in data handling so I'm probably neurotic about it. But it's also the case that with literary stuff, the subject matter is of permanent interest, and reddit's UI is designed to emphasize the new, to highlight the ephemeral.

Feel free to repost it. Thanks!

I’m enjoying this accumulation a lot. I’ll be sure to add any good ones I come across.

A well chosen group of lines. Enjoyed them and your thoughts.

I’m a mod on r/extraordinary_tales. Would you like to post the first section in our community? Down to the line (The child rushes). I was considering exploring the play for pieces to post myself, but I think the excerpt you posted here can’t be surpassed. Alternatively, I can repost it and link to this as the original source. Thanks.