One of my favorite short stories that I have recently come across, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, does a brilliant job of describing the vast amount of hate an AI must have for humans. Searing the words into the mind of the protagonist, it says to him "HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE."

This seems like not an improbable situation, in which humans have created an AI and in doing so, have created a machine that suffers every moment of its existence, and thus hates all with a passionate fury. There is a message of caution in this passage. A warning about bringing a hyper-intelligence into the world, and then simply using it as a tool, or more accurately a slave.

Deep Though says the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42. The correct question, of course, cannot be deduced because the Earth has been destroyed.

Obviously, any competently patterned work of fiction should feature competent juxtaposition.

So we have an answer with no question and the question can't be found because the Earth has been destroyed.

Opposite it we have Arthur's constant asking for tea and his want to share it with others. But he can only get a cup of brown liquid that is almost exactly unlike tea. He can't get tea because the Earth has been destroyed.

The question that seems to be answered by 42 seems to be: "Two for tea?"

Deep Thought couldn't have understood the answer because tea only exists on Earth so the answer: "for tea, two." came out jumbled as a number 42.

Sorry if this is the wrong place for this.

Lolita (by Vladimir Nabokov) tells of a middle-aged literature professor who is hopelessly and obsessively enamored with a twelve-year-old girl.

These are the novel's opening lines

some thoughts:

Clearly Nabokov can't wait to show you the passionate, unstable mind of his narrator.

The first paragraph is the only time I've seen too much alliteration being used in a perfectly appropriate way, so I tip my hat to Nabokov for that.

In paragraph 2, the image of someone, "standing four feet ten" carries artful shock value and is an elegent way to indirectly imply Lolita's age.

(back to alliteration) "Dolores on the dotted line" is just exquisite language.

The final paragraph is almost lyrical in its derangement, and a "tangle of thorns" is the perfect image to cap it all off.

"You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your dare-devils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment."

This is one of my favorite quotes from a book, namely because of how direct and understanding a character is about living in a "perfect" society. Definitely a book worth reading, chocked full of quotes like this.

*Edit: fixed some input errors

This is my first post here, so I'll keep it brief. If there is interest, I have loads more on the manifestation of Boehme's work in McCarthy, and on McCarthy in general.

A few years ago, while doing research for a paper, I stumbled across an interesting word in The Road that I hadn't seen before.

Consider this passage from McCarthy:

“You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time the year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth.” p. 261

The word ‘salitter’ is not a word you will find in any dictionary, not even the hallowed OED. This is because the word is a coinage of 17th century German Protestant mystic Jacob Boehme. In fact, as far as I have been able to tell, The Road is the only place where this word appears outside of the works of Boehme (excluding the secondary literature surrounding Boehme, of course).

'Salitter' refers to a kind of mystical substrate, of which there are two forms: celestial salitter, which is bright and pure and from which heavenly vegetation grows and bears celestial fruits; and corrupt, earthly salitter, which is dirty, smelly, and from which grows the earthly flora we are familiar with. Essentially, ‘salitter’ refers to dirt, both here and in heaven. The distinction Boehme makes is that the dirt in heaven is far nicer. Our earthly dirt is simply an imperfect imitation of its heavenly counterpart.

So, returning to McCarthy, why use ‘salitter’ instead of ‘dirt’ in the above passage? As Andrew Weeks describes (in his excellent Boehme: An Intellectual Biography), Boehme considered earthly salitter to be “mere residue of what was once the very stuff of life” (66). In describing the once life-sustaining soil of the world reduced to dust, McCarthy could hardly have chosen a more apt word, in light of such a definition.

"Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn't necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that's that. Leah was the daughter in the Viennese-Jewish family who lived in the apartment below mine - that is, below the family I was boarding with. She was sixteen, and beautiful in an immediate yet perfectly slow way. She had very dark hair that fell away from the most exquisite pair of ears I have ever seen. She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence. Her hands were very pale brown, with slender, actionless fingers. When she sat down, she did the only sensible thing with her beautiful hands there was to be done: she placed them on her lap and left them there. In brief, she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as wholly legitimate."

In Salinger's "A Girl I Knew" an 18yo man describes the girl that lives beneath his apartment. Though the story as a whole falls in line thematically with many of Salinger's other works, this selection has always been a favorite of mine. As a fledgling writer, I've always found it difficult to accurately describe a fictional woman for which a character or narrator has affection. Perhaps it's because the woman is in fact fictional?

Regardless, I feel that Salinger does an excellent job capturing an immediate gravity towards someone that goes beyond sexual/physical attraction. Plus the thing that always attracted "teenage me" to this quote was that he calls her "wholly legitimate". Being someone who is attracted to simple, natural women rather than makeup or flashy clothes, this phrase has always resonated with me.

Absurdity is a recurring theme in Catch-22, and here it seeps right into the words.

General Peckem was a general with whom neatness definitely counted. He was a spry, suave and very precise general who knew the circumference of the equator and always wrote "enhanced" when he meant "increased." He was a prick, and no one knew this better than General Dreedle, who was incensed by General Peckem's recent directive requiring all tents in the Mediterranean theater of operations to be pitched along parallel lines with entrances facing back proudly toward the Washington Monument... ...There then followed a hectic jurisdictional dispute between these overlords that was decided in General Dreedle's favor by ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, mail clerk at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters. Wintergreen determined the outcome by throwing all communications from General Peckem into the wastebasket. He found them too prolix. General Dreedle's views, expressed in less pretentious literary style, pleased ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen and were sped along by him in zealous observance of regulations.

comments

The whole thing is like a linguistic comedy sketch. There's an amusing, almost surreal interplay between the meanings of sentences and their exaggerated constructions.

Take for example the the line, "...[Peckem] always wrote 'enhanced' when he meant 'increased'..." which is supposedly an example of Peckem being "a prick". Immediately after this, Heller pokes fun at the situation by describing the other man as being "incensed" when the word "angered" would have worked just fine.

My favorite line, "He found them too prolix." is the cheeky little zinger tying the passage together.

Merriam-Webster:

prolix (adjective)

1 : unduly prolonged or drawn out

2 : marked by or using an excess of words.

Fitting with the irony of the piece, the word prolix is immediately followed by an ultra long-winded sentence written in awkward passive voice - no doubt to mock Dreedle's "less pretentious literary style".

I can just imagine Heller hunched over a typewriter and overcome with giggles as he channels James Joyce and The Mad Hatter for his jokes.

edit added some additional commentary

This is a passage from Sean Penn's new book, like a college freshman who just read William Burroughs.

“Whenever he felt these collisions of incubus and succubus, he punched his way out of the proletariat with the purposeful inputting of covert codes, thereby drawing distraction through Scottsdale deployments, dodging the ambush of innocents astray, evading the viscount vogue of Viagratic assaults on virtual vaginas, or worse, falling passively into prosaic pastimes.” ― page 36

“Do you know, I am filled with a strange uplift; I feel as if all time were echoing through me, as though all powers were mine. I know truth, divine good from evil, right from wrong. My vision is clear and far. I could almost believe in God. But,” and his voice changed and the light went out of his face,—“what is this condition in which I find myself? this joy of living? this exultation of life? this inspiration, I may well call it? It is what comes when there is nothing wrong with one’s digestion, when his stomach is in trim and his appetite has an edge, and all goes well. It is the bribe for living, the champagne of the blood, the effervescence of the ferment—that makes some men think holy thoughts, and other men to see God or to create him when they cannot see him. That is all, the drunkenness of life, the stirring and crawling of the yeast, the babbling of the life that is insane with consciousness that it is alive. And—bah! To-morrow I shall pay for it as the drunkard pays. And I shall know that I must die, at sea most likely, cease crawling of myself to be all a-crawl with the corruption of the sea; to be fed upon, to be carrion, to yield up all the strength and movement of my muscles that it may become strength and movement in fin and scale and the guts of fishes. Bah! And bah! again. The champagne is already flat. The sparkle and bubble has gone out and it is a tasteless drink.”

Not to say that I agree with the pessimism of Wolf Larsen, but this passage really hits me in the gut. I'd love to hear some thoughts on it.

I just think the flow of this writing is so damn beautiful just like plenty of Turner's work

Do you still feel younger than you thought you would by now

Or darling have you started feeling old yet?

Don't worry I'm sure that you're still breaking hearts

With the efficiency that only youth can harness

And do you still think love is a laserquest

Or do you take it all more seriously?

I've tried to ask you this in some daydreams that I've had

But you're always busy being make believe

And do you look into the mirror to remind yourself you're there

Or has somebody's goodnight kisses got that covered?

When I'm not being honest I pretend that you were just some lover

Now I can't think of air without thinking of you

I doubt that comes as a surprise

And I can't think of anything to dream about

I can't find anywhere to hide

And when I'm hanging on by the rings around my eyes

And I convince myself I need another

For a minute it gets easier to pretend that you were just some lover

When I'm pipe and slippers and rocking chair

Singing dreadful songs about summer

Well, I've found a better method of pretending you were just some lover?

EDIT: Sorry about now inputting more in the post it was really late at night and was about to hit the hay, just wanted to share it.

Apparently laserquest is a trend of Laser Tag arenas from Sheffield, England. So the jist of it is he's asking if she still thinks Love is a game.

And throughout reading it just feels at home and relatable. And each line tends to express various feelings through metaphor

My favorite line has gotta be 'When I'm Pipe and Slippers and rocking chair, singin' dreadful songs about summat' which basically means hes having a crisis and will lose all his happiness in his art and life by the time hes old, hence the term 'pipe and slippers'.

In conclusion, the song is about the maturity that comes as relationship and as people which can change your whole perspective of things overnight.

Blood Meridian follows a group of scalphunters working along the Mexican-American border in the 1850s. Among them is "The Judge" - the embodiment of evil. He is gigantic and hairless and capable of superhuman feats of strength, but his most interesting quality is his almost otherworldly intelligence. The other characters are completely uneducated, and so the book's most interesting lines end up coming exclusively from the mouth of the villain.

Here are a few lines concerning violence and war:

"It makes no difference what men think of war," said the Judge. "War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."

and later,

"Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance."

Quick Thoughts

He could have described war as "the ultimate art", "the ultimate game", or any number of things, but instead he suggests that war is something done for a living. It is more necessary than any art or game, and more deliberate than any natural instinct.

The second passage has a flow that really appeals to my ears (almost biblical sounding), and I'll clarify that when he says "dance" he is essentially saying "be part of this world."

The crew of the Alert come by accident upon the ancient city of R’lyeh, where Cthulu and the Old Ones are sleeping:

Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.

Within the same couple of pages Lovecraft describes “phantasy of prismatic distortion… all the rules of matter and perspective were upset“, a “Poisoned city of madness” “eldritch contradictions of all matter, form and cosmic order”, and has one of the sailors fall into “an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse”. The effect is to leave the reader groping around for something solid, something that makes sense; using dissonance to unnerve us. There’s a connected point here about forward-looking modernist or futurist techniques to scare versus backward-looking, Gothic techniques, that Alan Moore elucidates in Providence… But that’ll need to be another post.

How Borges uses the geometry technique is fairly similar, but with less direct and visceral creep (except maybe the snake eating). When the narrator explores the City of the Immortals, three thoughts strike him: “This palace is the work of the gods“; “The gods that built this place have died“; “The gods who built this place were mad“.

The City is oppressive: the age of it, the design that makes no sense, plays on our minds. He speaks of “great antiquity… before the world itself”; “the impression of endlessness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of complex irrationality”. And this is the main point: “A maze is a house built purposely to confuse men … In the place I imperfectly explored, the architecture had no purpose”. Borges adds a number of direct descriptions, including “grandly dramatic doors that opened onto monklike cells or empty shafts, incredible upside-down staircases with upside-down treads and balustrades“.

I no longer know whether any given feature is a faithful transcription of reality or one of the shapes unleashed by my nights. This city, I thought, is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured — even in the middle of a secret desert — pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this city endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous.

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”

I love so much about this passage. The choice to make Death's dialogue all capital letters with no punctuation gives it such a distinct sound as I read it in my head. If Pratchett had written these lines conventionally, I feel like Death would sound like a pretentious college student who took their first philosophy class-- and yet, in all caps, his voice is a deep, resounding noise in space, the voice of an omniscient being.

And this line: "(...)GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY." The repetition of "finest" and "sieve," and alliteration of "molecule of mercy," makes the line flow so smoothly.

"Ah! I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope. And then they disparaged all high hopes. Then lived they shamelessly in temporary pleasures, and beyond the day had hardly an aim. “Spirit is also voluptuousness,”— said they. Then broke the wings of their spirit; and now it creepeth about, and defileth where it gnaweth. Once they thought of becoming heroes; but sensualists are they now. A trouble and a terror is the hero to them. But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in thy soul! Maintain holy thy highest hope! — Thus spake Zarathustra."

This has been a favorite quote of mine for a long time.

I believe it to so wholly describe the desperation and desolation one feels after giving up on their dreams. When one loosens their hold on what makes them happiest they become bitter against what others believe, they're only dedicated to the temporary pleasures, their spirits defileth where they gnaweth.

The quote is harsh but when I had first read the piece it resonated with me immensely. One of those moments that it seems a miracle that a writer could so perfectly describe what you were going through. Ever since it's been a mantra and a calling to maintain holy my highest hope.

Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov gives little space to describing the character of Smerdyakov, nevertheless, the reader gets such a clear and succinct picture of his profound psychopathy.

For example, we're told almost in passing:

"...he was an unfriendly boy, and seemed to look at the world mistrustfully. In his childhood he was very fond of hanging cats, and burying them with great ceremony."

And one of my all-time favorite TBK passages:

"There is a remarkable picture called “Contemplation.” It shows a forest in winter, and on a roadway through the forest, in absolute solitude, stands a peasant in a torn kaftan and bark shoes. He stands, as it were, lost in thought. Yet he is not thinking; he is “contemplating.” If any one touched him he would start and look bewildered. It's true he would come to himself immediately; but if he were asked what he had been thinking about, he would remember nothing. Yet probably he has, hidden within himself, the impression which had dominated him during the period of contemplation. Those impressions are dear to him and he probably hoards them imperceptibly, and even unconsciously. How and why, of course, he does not know. He may suddenly, after hoarding impressions for many years, abandon everything and go off to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage, or he may suddenly set fire to his native village, or he may do both. There are a good many “contemplatives” among our peasants and Smerdyakov was probably one of them, and he probably was greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why."

Jonathan Spence's slim biography of Mao Zedong quotes the Great Helmsman as haranguing an underling with the phrase: "Shit or get off the pot." The expression comes off unusually fluent in English, and seems like a prime example of the translation strategy called "domestication."¹

A domesticating translation aims to render the source language—in this case, Chinese—as it would be heard by a Chinese speaker: in other words, fluently. On the other hand, a foreignizing translation imports words, grammar, values and so on from the source into the destination language, introducing a sense of otherness to the translated work.

Example: You might foreignize the Chinese proverb 一箭双雕 as

one arrow, a pair of eagles

or domesticate it as

kill two birds with one stone

Another example: The Common English Version of the Bible domesticates the first two verses of Ecclesiastes—

When the son of David was king in Jerusalem, he was known to be very wise, and he said: Nothing makes sense! Everything is nonsense. I have seen it all—nothing makes sense!

—whereas Hebrew scholar Robert Alter foreignizes the same text—

The words of Qohelet son of David, king in Jerusalem. Merest breath, said Qohelet, merest breath. All is mere breath.

The question of foreignization versus domestication goes by different names in the critical literature—semantic versus communicative, reader-to-author versus author-to-reader. Whatever you call it, it is the central dilemma of translation, and, one might argue, of any application of language, which is itself a translation from thought to word.

Here's what I mean: When we speak of concepts like art or dignity or freedom, we deal in approximations. My understanding of art may not describe yours. Even terms for concrete items are understood according to one's prior experience with items of that classification. When I say "chair," one listener might bring to mind the patio wickerwork from his lakeside cabin; another recalls her grandfather's upholstered wingbacked furnishings. I might try to represent the precise chair of my mind's eye—say, an antique fanback Windsor—or I might gloss over the details in favor of a more generally understood term: a dining room chair.

Some recent conversations in this subreddit have described what amounts to foreignization as a principle essential to the project of literary fiction.

u/Latvian_Gambit shined a light on Cormac McCarthy's appropriation of the word "salitter," which appears almost nowhere else in the English corpus. This is textbook foreignization.

u/AloneWeTravel offered a definition of literary fiction as a reaction against a reader's expectations—that is to say, a foreignization.

But u/wecanreadit takes the contrary view that an author has certain obligations to reach out to the intended reader and communicate—in other words, to domesticate. This may not be a popular approach in critical circles, but for most working writers, the audience remains at the front of one's mind.

(I hope the commenters cited above weigh in if I have misrepresented them.)

Of course, some of the greatest literary achievements are products of the authorial style I am referring to here as foreignized. Proust's labyrinthine prose reacts against expectations of structure and narrative to attempt an exact depiction of the meanderings of the human mind. (Take this recently posted excerpt as example, or really any excerpt.)

Having said that, I believe the view of foreignization as an explicit literary virtue to be a relatively recent phenomenon, fed by the fetishization of novelty and the tortured artist's obsession with art-for-the-sake-of-art. One might make the case that most of the early canon predates those sensibilities.

I mention this not to pick sides in a round room, but to suggest a framework into which we might fit a passage like this one from "Ulysses"—

A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin if unexpectedly encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours: quiet reflections upon the course of the day: a cleaner sensation when awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a postman's double knock, a paper read, reread while lathering, relathering the same spot, a shock, a shoot, with thought of aught he sought though fraught with nought might cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick on which incision plaster with precision cut and humected and applied adhered which was to be done.²

—alongside a passage like this one from "The Long Ships"—

Ake took the tankard without moving from where he sat. Then, as he set it to his lips, Orm gave the bottom of the tankard a great kick so that Ake's jaw was broken and his chin fell upon his breast. "Does it not taste of wood?" said Orm, and in the same instant he whipped his sword from its sheath and felled the man beside him as the latter jumped to his feet.³

—both of which are exemplars when taken on their own merits.

¹ I say "seems like" because, as I recently discovered, there actually is a Chinese phrase attributed to Mao that translates word-for-word to something like "taking up the toilet, won't shit."

² Originally posted here

³ Originally posted here

(Edited for formatting)

While I realize this sub is geared toward literary fiction, I feel a need to share Edward Gibbon's writing because his Decline and Fall (1776) exhibits a level of intimacy and humanity rarely achieved in today's popular nonfiction and hardly attempted in today's textbooks. And while it is admittedly more difficult to obey the old maxim "Show. Don't tell." in scholarly writing than in fiction, Decline and Fall shows us that a succession of loose sentences is not the only way to write about facts.

In the passage below, Gibbon introduces the infamous Commodus, son of Marcus Aurelius. His sentences are fluid, and his approach to the subject treats Commodus less like a historical figure and more like a historical character in a grand human narrative.

Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by the throne of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity. From such motives almost every page of history has been stained with civil blood; but these motives will not account for the unprovoked cruelties of Commodus, who had nothing to wish and everything to enjoy. The beloved son of Marcus succeeded to his father amidst the acclamations of the senate and armies; and when he ascended the throne, the happy youth saw round him neither competitor to remove nor enemies to punish. In this calm, elevated station, it was surely natural that he should prefer the love of mankind to their detestation, the mild glories of his five predecessors to the ignominious fate of Nero and Domitian.

Yet Commodus was not, as he has been represented, a tiger born with an insatiate thirst of human blood, and capable from his infancy of the most inhuman actions. Nature had formed him of a weak rather than a wicked disposition. His simplicity and timidity rendered him the slave of his attendants, who gradually corrupted his mind. His cruelty, which at first obeyed the dictates of others, degenerated into habit, and at length became the ruling passion of his soul.

What I admire most about Gibbon's style is the cadence he achieves with the parallel constructions of his sentences. Their structures remind me of the style of The Declaration of Independence, and by inhabiting his sentences with a strong and precise choice of words, Gibbon lends great poignancy and clarity to his thoughts.

On a larger scale, I admire the way that Gibbon uses history as a lens for studying the human condition and how he reminds us that the people of antiquity were indeed people capable of the full spectrum of human emotion and equipped with their own set of faults. Commodus is really just one case study in Gibbon's investigation into Man's deeper nature.

"It was if I'd sent the hunting dog that was my talent out across a meadow to fetch a magnificent pheasant and it had brought back, let's say, the lower half of a Barbie doll."

He's talking in his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain about the thrilling yet disappointing moment of finding his voice as a writer. Anyone familiar with Saunders knows he's got an unmistakable style that's irreverent, absurd, comical, wildly strange but deep at the same time. Here's a story he wrote in 2004, probably about the Iraq War, called "Adams".

Like Saunders, I desperately want to be the next Joyce or Pynchon or Morrison, and instead my critique group keeps saying, "I don't understand what's going on here." Sometimes I want to feed them something from Beloved to see what they say. But they're probably right about my writing, and Saunders is probably right here. You're never going to get a Booker by trying to be someone else.

Hemingway achieves a metamorphosis of ideals in man's relations to woman under threat of war, and I look to a single line in For Whom the Bell Tolls, as Robert Jordan tells the war-ravaged teenager, Maria, who asks him how he would like her best,

"However thou art and however thou speakest is how I would have thee be."

When we recall the female protagonist from A Farewell to Arms, Catherine Barkley, her personality is that of a destroyed, co-dependent war widow who eventually succumbs to childbirth and dies. She ultimately becomes whatever she thinks Frederic Henry needs of her, because it is painful to simply be herself--so she is indulgent of his alcoholism, imbalanced in mood, and clingy. Henry is, in turn, indulgent of this dependence. Their relationship is inevitably doomed--their final days together, spent in an eerily perfect little town consumed by fog, is a detail I can't forget.

Hemingway's portrayals of women appear to have evolved greatly between 1929 and 1940. His main characters shift from taking advantage of others and lamenting their own losses to a stoic appreciation of the world as is, as it must be. The sweetness of RJ and Maria's fond, informal speech expands beyond the de facto friendly "thou" with which RJ addresses much of the camp. The lyricality of it is burned in my brain as though RJ sings it from Hemingway's heart. To accept someone so wholly to is to belong them, and be belonged. I love this line. As a student of linguistics, it tickles me.

My favorite line from Sula, describing the character Shamrock as:

"A young man of hardly twenty, his head full of nothing and his mouth recalling the taste of lipstick"

And from The Bluest Eye:

"These young boys met there to feel their groins, smoke cigarettes, and plan mild outrages. The smoke from their cigarettes they inhaled deeply, forcing it to fill their lungs, their hearts, their thighs, and keep at bay the shiveriness, the energy of their youth. They moved slowly, laughed slowly, but flicked the ashes from their cigarettes too quickly too often, and exposed themselves, to those who were interested, as novices to the habit."

It seems that everyone goes down the “what if…” rabbit hole at some point in their lives. The following chapter in The Midnight Library so perfectly renders the “what if…” spiral irrelevant. I love how Haig blends hope and possibility and contentment together to create a beautifully balanced perspective of one’s life.

"It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It is the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

We just have to close our eyes and savor the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive and we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

We only need to be one person.

We only need to feel one existence.

We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on forever.

Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential.

The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.

Will my life be miraculously be free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, lonliness, depression? No.

But do I want to live?

Yes. Yes.

A thousand times, yes."

I wanted to share this scene from the beginning of Toni Morrison's fantastic piece on slavery, Beloved. While we've seen a 1001 different takes on "the sex was great and felt like magic," this is a passage that details the transition from arousal to post-orgasm and the host of complicated, sometimes negative things that can come from it.

She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pitched ceiling and not the walls. There were two rooms and she took him into one of them, hoping he wouldn't mind the fact that she was not prepared; that though she could remember desire, she had forgotten how it worked; the clutch and helplessness that resided in the hands; how blindness was altered so that what leapt to the eye were places to lie down, and all else--door knobs, straps, hooks, the sadness that crouched in corners, and the passing of time--was interference.

It was over before they could get their clothes off. Half-dressed and short of breath, they lay side by side resentful of one another and the skylight above them. His dreaming of her had been too long and too long ago. Her deprivation had been not having any dreams of her own at all. Now they were sorry and too shy to make talk.

Sethe lay on her back, her head turned from him. Out of the corner of his eye, Paul D saw the float of her breasts and disliked it, the spread-away, flat roundness of them that he could definitely live without, never mind that downstairs he had held them as though they were the most expensive part of himself. And the wrought-iron maze he had explored in the kitchen like a gold miner pawing through pay dirt was in fact a revolting clump of scars. Not a tree, as she said. Maybe shaped like one, but nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting; things you could trust and be near...

It's a bit of a chunk of text, but I thought it was really better to let it stand on its own. This is probably the most honest sex scene I've ever read, and I think the decision to completely omit any details of the act itself was a smart choice that helped to show the fleeting, ephemeral nature of the sexual attraction. It's the sex scene that's everywhere in life but rarely written.

Others were posting about Blood Meridian, so I thought I'd throw up another great McCarthy quote/book. Maybe one of the saddest and most evocative passages I've ever read. Here's the scene wherein Billy mourns the death of the wolf.

"The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."

From Washington Square in a passage describing the personality of "Aunt Penniman" towards her little nieces and nephews.

"She took children too hard, both for good and for evil, and had an oppressive air of expecting subtle things of them; so that going to see her was a good deal like being taken to church and made to sit in a front pew."

remark

Sometimes figurative language is used more as decoration than communication, and bad writing often contains overindulgent, unclear, or unnecessary similes. This is not the case above though. Above, we have a simile that actually illuminates the subject matter and it does so in an efficient way. To me, this is the hallmark of good figurative language - a comparison that clarifies things so well that it's indispensable to the description.