Monday, July 16, 2012

chosen field: life.

I will once again post the words of another; one far more poetic and experienced than I.

Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road:

Various ultimate careers were predicted for him, the consensus being that his work would lie somewhere "in the humanities" if not precisely in the arts--it would, at any rate, be something that called for a long and steadfast dedication--and that it would involve his early and permanent withdrawal to Europe, which he often described as the only part of the world worth living in. And Frank himself, walking the streets at daybreak after some of those talks, or lying and thinking on Bethune Street on nights when he had the use of the place but had no girl to use it with, hardly ever entertained a doubt of his exceptional merit. Weren't the biographies of all great men filled with this same kind of youthful grouping, this same kind of rebellion against their fathers and their fathers' ways? He could even be grateful in a sense that he had no particular area of interest: in avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.
     Part 1, Ch 2, page 29.

But she needed no more advice and no more instruction. She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.
     Part 3, Ch 7, page 425.



Friday, July 6, 2012

strange dreams. [be daring].

“In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular activity, vividness and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truth like and filled with details so delicate, so unexpected, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system.”
       -Part I, Chapter V, p. 57

“And I kept thinking…And I had dreams all the time, strange dreams of all sorts, no need to describe! Only then I began to fancy that….No, that’s not it! Again I am telling you wrong! You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid, that if others are stupid--and I know they are--yet I won’t be wiser? Then I saw, Sonia, that if one waits for everyone to get wiser it will take too long….Afterwards I understood that that would never come to pass, that men won’t change and that nobody can alter it and that it’s not worth wasting effort over it. Yes, that’s so. That’s the law of their nature, Sonia…that’s so!…And I know now, Sonia, that whoever is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them. Anyone who is greatly daring is right in their eyes. He who despises most things will be a law-giver among them and he who dares most of all will be most in the right! So it has been till now and so it will always be. A man must be blind not to see it!”
       -Part IV, Chapter III, p. 413

“‘…But what I say is, that if you convince a person logically that he has nothing to cry about, he’ll stop crying. That’s clear. Is it your conviction that he won’t?’
      ‘Life would be too easy if it were so,’ answered Raskolnikov.”
       -Part IV, Chapter IV, p. 419

Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment.