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.
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.
1 comment:
Not sure if I sent my favourites from this book already, but here's one of them:
"It simply wasn’t worth feeling bad about. Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were."
-Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, chapter2, p20
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