Tag: reading

T. S. Eliot and the Extended Chiasmus

Symmetry and Time in T. S. Eliot’s poem “Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears”.

Today’s Quote is a short poem by T. S. Eliot. It is the closest I have come to finding an embodiment of internal mirroring, or of the so called chiasmus.

A chiasmus, pronounced /kʌɪˈazməs/, from the Greek word meaning crossing or diagonal arrangement, is a figure of speech that repeats two ideas or grammatical structures in inverted order.

At its simplest and silliest it adds no meaning:

He dreams of success, and of success he dreams.

(Although, there are examples where this special case of chiasmus, also sometimes called antimetabole, is made to work to splendid effect; an oft-cited example is John F. Kennedy’s United Nations Speech in 1961, when he said: Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind. It’s clever, and it’s not something you come up with on the spot.)

Beyond the simplest inversion, chiasmus can use parallel word pairs to add meaning:

Loving is a celebration of life, just as living is a celebration of love.

Or it can pun on different meanings of a word:

The novel must be written, but also the writing must be novel.

At its most advanced, an extended chiasmus can invert ideas and images on a larger scale. Here is the poem; see if you can spot a chiasmus or two.

Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears by T. S. Eliot

Eyes that last I saw in tears
Through division
Here in death’s dream kingdom
The golden vision reappears
I see the eyes but not the tears
This is my affliction

This is my affliction
Eyes I shall not see again
Eyes of decision
Eyes I shall not see unless
At the door of death’s other kingdom
Where, as in this,
The eyes outlast a little while
A little while outlast the tears
And hold us in derision.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Clever, imperfect symmetry that allows for a sense of progression from one side to the other.

Continue reading “T. S. Eliot and the Extended Chiasmus”

The Sunny Absurd

On Albert Camus’ Stranger, and the book’s main antagonist: the sun, as a symbol of the absurd.

sun glare
Photo by David Law

 

Albert Camus’ Stranger (1942) has one protagonist, the first person narrator called Meursault, and one antagonist: the sun. The book is originally in French; I quote from a translation by Stuart Gilbert. I have italicised all the words related to the sun.

Quote: There was the same red glare as far as the eye could reach, and small waves were lapping the hot sand in little, flurried gasps. As I slowly walked toward the boulders at the end of the beach I could feel my temples swelling under the impact of the light. It pressed itself on me, trying to check my progress. And each time I felt a hot blast strike my forehead, I gritted my teeth, I clenched my fists in my trouser pockets and keyed up every nerve to fend off the sun and the dark befuddlement it was pouring into me. Whenever a blade of vivid light shot upward from a bit of shell or broken glass lying on the sand, my jaws set hard. I wasn’t going to be beaten, and I walked steadily on.

Any book blurb gives away that this is a story of how Meursault got drawn into a murder on an Algerian beach. There’s also mention of the story being Camus’ exploration of the nakedness of man faced with the absurd. The Quote describes Meursault walking along the fateful beach, and his physical fight with the absurdity of his situation.

The Quote is not a spoiler. The book is short, around 100 pages, and within the first quarter the following words play prominent roles in conveying the oppressive mood of absurdity: sun, light, heat, lamps. The remaining three quarters intensify the heat — summer and the plot set in.

Oh, and the opening words are: Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. That surely adds to the heavy mood, and yet, the only image that had stayed with me since I last read this book, half a life ago, was the dazzle of yellow and white that can wreck havoc on the mind.

 

What makes the Quote quiver?

Sun-glare.

Continue reading “The Sunny Absurd”

The Daffodil and the Preserved Prunes

Christopher Morley in “Pipefuls”, on seeing agrarian unrest and industrial riot in flowers and prunes, and on the human sympathy trust.

daffodil, yellow
Photo by Aaron Burden

Quote: His girded spirit sees agrarian unrest in the daffodil and industrial riot in a tin of preserved prunes.

That’s Christopher Morley writing in his essay, Thoughts on Cider, taken from his collection of humorous essays, Pipefuls (1920). In the Quote, Morley is referring to a poet called Dove Dulcet. A bit of internet snooping suggests that Dulcet may have been Morley’s pseudonym, or that Dulcet may have been a literary agent. (Let me know in the comments if you know the answer.)

The Quote tickled my fancy in more ways than one. There’s the minor mystery of who Dove is; there’s the minor question of what exactly is meant by a girded spirit; there’s the poor daffodil with unrest in its soul, and the poor tin of prunes brewing riot within its walls.

I sought to explain the girded spirit by referring to the context of the Quote.

Dove is one who has faced many and grievous woes. His Celtic soul peers from behind cloudy curtains of alarm. Old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago fume in the smoke of his pipe. His girded spirit sees agrarian unrest in the daffodil and industrial riot in a tin of preserved prunes. He sees the world moving on the brink of horror and despair. Sweet dalliance with a baked bloater on a restaurant platter moves him to grief over the hard lot of the Newfoundland fishing fleet.

I was left with a sense of: spirit girded by sorrow and discontent.

But the daffodil! Yes, I agree, girded spirit or not, who could accuse a daffodil of such subversion? (Tinned fruit has always been suspicious, I’ll give him that.)

What makes the Quote quiver?

Shock tactic.

Continue reading “The Daffodil and the Preserved Prunes”

Seabluegreen Eyes

On style and writing in Keri Hulme’s love story, “The Bone People”. The book is an outlier, in a good way.

Sea, waves, bluegreen, foam
Photo by Christian Van Bebber

 

An outlier brooks no terse introduction. Nevertheless, give me five hundred words to try. Meet Keri Hulme’s novel, The Bone People, Booker Prize winner for 1985.

New Zealand, nineteen eighties, a cruel, vibrant, love story between three unrelated people: a woman, a child, and a man; a mystery infused with Maori myths, soaked with Maori language, suspended between poetry and prose, written unconventionally but with effusive, effortless erudition.

The emotional ride — having recently finished the book — I would describe as explosive disbelief, followed by heartwarming realisation that not all conventional wisdom is sound, not all differences are differences, and that there is hope for us human beings, whichever way we are wrought and then brought together. You, no doubt, would express yourself in other words: there is great latitude for interpretation.

The book is unique, in style and in substance.

The following quote illustrates a few unusual aspects of the writing. The typographic features, indentation and spacing, are deliberate. (The quote is given as an image, to ensure that all browsers preserve the typography.)

Quote from

Continue reading “Seabluegreen Eyes”

How to: Find a Book You’ll Enjoy

Humorous delivery of genuine advice on how to find the next book you’re likely to enjoy reading.

Which book should you read next?

You already have a reading list for the next few years, ah, excuse me, please skip this blog post.

You’re still here? Good, let me explain myself. WordPress bloggers regularly ask strangers on the internet for reading advice. And assuming bloggers aren’t an entirely exceptional race, it’s a dilemma pressing on a nontrivial percentage of human minds.

Unless you’re entirely inexperienced with books (in which case you should say so), or you’re asking advice on choosing between specific books, for a specific reason, where you can expect a reasonable, meaningful, non-random answer: why ask anyone at all? Sure, you could ask your childhood librarian friend who knows you better than you know yourself. But the librarian internet is not to be trusted to bounce back friendly answers every time. Better search for the answer yourself, trust me.

Indeed, here’s my proposed method to narrow down the book universe to your next literary companion.

Continue reading “How to: Find a Book You’ll Enjoy”

The Ideal Reader: Quirks and Perks

The ideal reader according to Alberto Manguel in “A Reader on Reading”.

The ideal reader wishes both to get to the end of the book and to know that the book will never end.
— Alberto Manguel, A Reader on Reading

In the chapter titled Notes Towards the Definition of an Ideal Reader, Manguel lists around seventy, sometimes contradictory (or paradoxical?), statements about the ideal reader. He’s onto something.

Continue reading “The Ideal Reader: Quirks and Perks”

Similes and Smiles

Describing the intangible. On meditation, happiness, and the habits of a thinking mind.

Photo by ryan baker

In The Quantum and the Lotus Matthieu Ricard speaks about meditation, and how the effect of meditation on the mind can be described.

Quote: For example, some authors say that thought is initially like a frothing waterfall, then like a stream with occasional eddies, then like a large river with the odd ripple running over it, and finally like the ocean, whose depths are never disturbed.

A simile is a figure of speech that compares two seemingly disparate objects. It describes by analogy. The word simile itself comes from the Latin word like, and used to also mean likeness, resemblance, similarity (in examples such as: there is no simile between the two). Imitation is a basic learning mechanism. Our acts, words, ideas are first seen, repeated, then modified by circumstance or will. We start by emulating our parents, our friends, our teachers; later on we emulate ourselves, learning and improving on what we have done. The mutual similarity and the gradual alternations of our actions allow for (a perceived?) continuity of personality.

Continue reading “Similes and Smiles”

The Sense of Being Average

“Average at life; average at truth; morally average,” says Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending. Tricolon with a twist makes the quote tick.

One more vegetable amongst other vegetables.

Quote: Average, that’s what I’d been, ever since I left school. … Average at life; average at truth; morally average.

This is Tony speaking, the protagonist of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, which won the Man Booker Prize for 2011. He, Tony, is brooding over a life lost to muddling about, to getting by, to letting go of aspirations and dreams.

The full quote gets the point across explicitly, familiar example included.

Average, that’s what I’d been, ever since I left school. Average at university and work; average in friendship, loyalty, love; average, no doubt, at sex. There was a survey of British motorists a few years ago which showed that ninety-five per cent of those polled through they were “better than average” drivers. But by law of averages, we’re most of us bound to be average. Not that this brought any comfort. The word resounded. Average at life; average at truth; morally average.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Word-hammering of average with the word-order change.

Continue reading “The Sense of Being Average”

Swirling Sahara and an Apricot Whoosh

Diane Ackerman describes our senses, vividly, with humour and humility. Studying her writing for clues what makes her prose sing.

Quote: White clouds shoot out in all directions, in a dust storm of flame, a gritty, swirling Sahara, burning from gray-white to an incandescent platinum so raw it makes your eyes squint, to the radiant gold so narcotic you forget how to blink.

This is Diane Ackerman describing a night launch of the space shuttle in her wonderful non-fiction book A Natural History of The Senses. 

Photo by Sugar Bee, sourced from Unsplash.

It has become trite to label a book wonderful, as if the word has been bleached of meaning, and left only with a wash of lukewarm approval. A shame. I rather prefer and, in this case, mean:  full of wonder; such as to excite wonder or astonishment; marvellous. Truly.

Let me dole out a bit more of her prose, as precious proof, how non-fiction can stir an image as much as fiction can. The Quote above continues as follows.

The air is full of bee stings, prickly and electric. Your pores start to itch. Hair stands up stiff on the back of your neck. It used to be that the launch pad would melt at lift-off, but now the 300,000 gallons of water crash from aloft, burst from below. Steam clouds scent the air with a mineral ash. Crazed by reflection, the waterways turn the color of pounded brass. Thick cumulus clouds shimmy and build at ground level, where you don’t expect to see thunderheads.

Photo by Garrett Carroll, sourced from Unsplash

Continue reading “Swirling Sahara and an Apricot Whoosh”

Knowledge: Quirks and Perks

What is the currenty of knowledge? A quote from Luca Turin, a pioneer of the vibrational olfactory theory/

Diversity

“Metaphor is the currency of knowledge.”

— Luca Turin, quoted by Chandler Burr in The Emperor of Scent

(In The Emperor of Scent (2003) Chandler Burr tells how Luca Turin, a French-Italian biophysicist, originated the vibrational theory of olfaction and struggled to be heard within the scientific community. Exciting non-fiction book, lively prose, highly recommended.)

Metaphors, by their non-literal nature, are built on disparate knowledge.

Here is the full quote:

“Metaphor is the currency of knowledge. I have spent my life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful. Why. Because there is no such things as disconnected facts. There is only complex structure. And both to explain complex structure to others and, perhaps more important—this is forgotten, usually—to understand them oneself, one needs better metaphors.”

I agree with his viewpoint.

This week’s quotes may have been rather dark, with Richard Morgan’s mass murder, China Miéville’s ambulatory corpse, and the humour of suicidal and homicidal birds from E. B. White’s essay Mr Forbush’s Friends, but perhaps that’s alright.

All sorts of knowledge come in handy: deep and shallow, dispiriting and uplifting, morbid and pure. Indeed, staying away from the nasty, reading just about the nice, would leave us few verbal and mental tools — perhaps even leave us an unexercised imagination — with which to fight the daily melancholy of our own lives, let alone some fiercer trouble. Facing demons within the safety of literary worlds is practice, and the only kind of practice we can get before reality strikes unreservedly, untempered.

PS (added on 5 May 2017): I just noticed that Ian McEwan said in his 2002 interview for the Paris Review: “We need to play out our fears within the safe confines of the imaginary, as a form of hopeful exorcism.”

Avian Black Humour

E. B. White shows us how to summarise for humour in his essay Mr. Forbushe’s Friends.

The Indian Black-naped oriole

I see him, again, concealed in the lowest branches of a spruce on a small island off the Maine coast—a soft, balmy night. He is observing the arrival of Leach’s petrels, whose burrows are underneath the tree—eerie, strange birds, whose chuckling and formless sounds might have been the conversation of elves.

This is E. B. White writing in his essay Mr. Forbush’s Friends. Who and what and, dear me, why elves?

Edward Howe Forbush wrote Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States (1927–29), a book E. B. White cherished and returned to over the years, and subsequently wrote about in the aforementioned essay calling it “a three-volume summation of the avian scene”. Through his own writing, White transmitted Mr Forbush’s enthusiasm and even found merit in his rich prose occasionally touched with purple but never with dullness or disenchantment — high praise from the co-author of Strunk & White, where Omit needless words is a dictum carved in stone.

A rather dull topic for those not interested in birds, isn’t it?

But, no!

Continue reading “Avian Black Humour”

Ambulatory Oxymoron

You don’t have to write literary fiction to justify using figures of speech. Metaphor and oxymoron in China Miéville’s short story.

Death at the lectern; we’d have a lot to learn

Quote: The disappearing body quickly became shorthand. Anything lost was considered pocketed by our ambulatory corpse on its way home. Unexpected noises in the corridors were the incompetent creeping of the revenant.

This is China Miéville’s disappearing body from The Design, published in his collection of short stories Three Moments of an Explosion. A body has disappeared from the dissection room where medical students study anatomy, and we are hearing about the atmosphere that developed thereafter. A morbid setting, but these are students of medicine, who have learned, perforce, to joke about their environment.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Deadpan delivery of compressed paradox.

Continue reading “Ambulatory Oxymoron”

Murder Gradations

Figures of speech at the heart of Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk murder myster, Altered Carbon.

"[Géographie. La Terre à vol d'oiseau ... Troisième édition illustrée de 176 gravures sur bois.]" Author: RECLUS, Onésime.
Mass murder of trees, also known as deforestation

Quote: The only problem [the lawyers] had, as they cruised sharkishly back and forth across the cool marble floor of the court, was in drawing the fine differences between war (mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own), justifiable loss (mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains) and criminal negligence (mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit).

There you have former UN elite soldier Takeshi Kovacs assessing a group of military lawyers in Richard Morgan’s debut novel Altered Carbon. It’s a hardboiled cyberpunk murder mystery (and a mouthful if you say it like that). Before anyone points out that the Quote is either philosophically inaccurate or unpalatably blunt, let me repeat what I said: hardboiled, cyberpunk, murder mystery.

It’s fiction.

It’s also set in the 25th century. We have colonised other planets, and consciousness can be downloaded into a cortical stack, stored, and plugged into another body (also called a sleeve) as many times as the owner can afford it. Despite coming that close to immortality, mankind still fights wars, perpetuates crime&cruelty, and strives — ineffectually — to crush the depravity of the human condition.

It makes for a fine book, if you care for the genre. The strong, well-developed first person narrative of the anti-hero Kovacs and the deep, detailed world-building carry the reader along like a turgid river a tiny raft.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Gradation of similar phrases and parenthetical delivery.

Continue reading “Murder Gradations”

Reading: Quirks and Perks

“Reading is the freeing of words, and some bonds are explosive.” Translating from Serbian a N. N. Stefanović quote.

The book of gold, and other poems, Trowbridge, J. T. (John Townsend), 1827-1916 Charles E. Feinberg Collection of Walt Whitman (Library of Congress) DLC
The hurt that words can cause

Reading is the freeing of words, and some bonds are explosive.

— Nenad Novak Stefanović, Svetlarnik (in QQ translation)

The original quote is in Serbian:

Čitanje je oslobađanje reči, a neki spojevi su eksplozivni.

I am unaware of an English translation, so I attempted a translation myself. (Any professional translators out there with a better version, please let me know!)

Note on translation: a curiosity.

Serbian has a tiny coordinating conjunction word a, which often translates to either the English (cumulative) conjunction and, or the English (adversative) conjunction but, depending on the context. Here’s an example:
Dan je, a mračno je napolju.   means  It’s day but it’s dark outside.
Dan je, a to znači da ne može napolju biti mračno. means It’s day and that means it can’t be dark outside.

Serbian also has the equivalent of the plain, old and, which is given by another single letter: i.

Mortal Metaphors

Have you always wanted to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but never found a way to get started? Here’s how.

Synopsis of North American butterflies Year: 1879 (1870s) Authors: Edwards, William H. (William Henry), 1822-1909
Aphrodite’s butterflies

Have you always wanted to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but never found a way to get started? No? Am I helping when I say it’s 600 pages of narrative poetry in Latin written in 8 AD and that it covers the myth and history of the world from the beginning to Julius Caesar? Oh and it influenced Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. There, if that didn’t convince you that the following quote — which is not from Metamorphoses — is relevant, I don’t know what will.

Quote: The gods are invoked or they initiate. They are the intermittent forces, applied at the end of the lever, with a mortal at the fulcrum on whom a myth turns.

This is a line from A. S. Kline‘s A Honeycomb for Aphrodite, Reflections on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It’s a reasonable, easy-to-understand, 120-page book. It doesn’t claim to be an introduction to the subject matter, but it can give you an idea of what to expect. Also, the author has published his own translation of Ovid’s poem into prose (in the same book). Instead of struggling through meter and stanza you can read in full sentences a sweet little summary of its contents.

However, if you wish to indulge in a beautiful translation, after much internet traipsing, I’ve concluded (possibly incorrectly?) that this translation by Allen Mandelbaum is poetically the most satisfactory.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Simplification.

Continue reading “Mortal Metaphors”

Flies in Catch-22

Paradox, epanalepsis, and assonance in Joseph Heller’s quote about flies in eyes.

River scenery by J. M. W. Turner (because you’d rather see this than a closeup of a fly, I presume)

Quote: How can he see he’s got flies in his eyes if he’s got flies in his eyes?

The Quote appears one page after Joseph Heller explains the (in)famous catch in his novel Catch-22.

It reminds me of this (presumably) rather more famous quote from the King James Bible.

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:5)

How can you see you have a beam in your own eye (or that there’s a mote in your brother’s) if you’ve got a beam in your own eye?

(That was a rhetorical question!)

What makes the Quote quiver?

The hook.

Continue reading “Flies in Catch-22”

Rosebuds Bow Courteously

E. B. White and the unruffled but prickly surface of a pasture pond. Exemplary writing, and what makes it so.

Roses bowing for love

Quote: The pasture pond was unruffled but had the prickly surface caused by raindrops, and it seemed bereft without geese. The sky was a gloomy grey. Two rosebuds bowed courteously to each other on the terrace.

A vivid few sentences by E. B. White in his essay, Eye of the Edna, from the book Essays of E. B. White. He is describing his farmyard before Hurricane Edna struck New England in 1954.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Vividness, word choice, and economy.

Continue reading “Rosebuds Bow Courteously”

The Written Word: Quirks and Perks

Alberto Manguel on metaphors and quotations from “A Reader on Reading”.

From Volume 8 of Prose and Verse ... by William James Linton.
Read and Write

On metaphors, quotations, and the continuity of literature, while the world and the times change. From one of the best books about books, A Reader on Reading, by Alberto Manguel.

Metaphor builds on metaphor and quotation on quotation. For some, the words of others are a vocabulary of quotations in which they express their own thoughts. For others those foreign words are their own thoughts, and the very act of putting them on paper transforms those words imagined by others into something new, reimagined through a different intonation or context. Without this continuity, this purloining, this translation, there is no literature. And through these dealings, literature remains immutable, like the tired waves, while the world around it changes.

— Alberto Manguel, in AIDS and the Poet, from A Reader on Reading

There. Something for the weekend.

Periodic Before Dawn

Analysing why John Banville’s opening line of “The Infinities” works so well.

Dawn. The Greeks gave us rhetoric and the figures of speech.

You have settled down next to a window, a night lamp, or a tablet. You have turned to the first page of a book, and …

 Quote: Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.

This is the opening sentence of John Banville’s The Infinities (2009). Even though the blurb, the book cover, the book reviews, the comments from friends and social media sites and the kitchen sink may have had their say by the time the poor reader reaches this sentence, it is still the starting point of the author’s tale. And what a starting point!

What makes the Quote quiver?

Curiosity and elegance. Continue reading “Periodic Before Dawn”