Art & Literature
Moonlight in front of my bed. I took it for frost on the ground. I lift my head, gaze at the mountain moon. Lower it, and think of home. ----- Li Bai
"I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being" Hafiz.
You are alpsulummply wroght. James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake.
In the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language in any sinse of the world. James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake.
I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it. James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake, 213, 11-12
History, said Stephen, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. James Joyce, Ulysses.
Come forth Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. James Joyce, Ulysses.
". . . lo, as you would quaffoff his fraudstuff and sink teeth through pyth of flowerwhite bodey behold of him as behemoth for he is noewhemoe. Finiche! Only a fadograph of a yestern scene." Joyce: Finnegans Wake, p. 7
Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me? -- Samuel Beckett
Yes, I was thinking: we live without a future. That's what's queer ... VIRGINIA WOOLF
Is it her singing that enchants us or is it not rather the solemn stillness enclosing her frail little voice? [Kafka, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"].
"We call ›idea‹ that which always manifests itself and hence presents itself to us as the law of all appearances." Goethe
On May 5, 1786, Goethe wrote to Jacobi: "When Spinoza speaks of the Scientia intuitiva and says: This kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of the essential form of certain attributes of God to an adequate knowledge of the essence of things; then these few words give me the courage to devote my entire life to the observation of things […] and to hope to develop an adequate idea of their essentiae formalis." (FA 29:629)
Van Gogh:
“Isn’t it a true religion that these simple Japanese teach us, who live in nature as though they themselves were flowers?”
Paul Klee:
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
From a Persian Poem:
There is no news flying around here, but one which is traveling from mouth to mouth. It seems somebody has mentioned your name. Your perfume has lingered in the air. Your perfume ....... your perfume....
Using Metaphors: Some Examples
In "Gone with the Wind", Margaret Mitchell uses metaphor to make not a visual point, but a conceptual one: ‘The very mystery of him excited her curiosity like a door that had neither lock nor key.’
In "The Big Sleep", Raymond Chandler uses metaphor to pack a ton of meaning into just seven words: ‘Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.’
Graham Greene in "The Quiet American" uses a finely judged metaphor: ‘I tried to move away from him and take my own weight, but the pain came roaring back like a train in a tunnel.’
Arundhati Roy in "The God of Small Things" uses metaphorical language to sensual effect when describing a love scene between the characters Ammu and Valutha: ‘She could feel herself through him. Her skin. The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.’
The eighteenth-century writer and critic Denis Diderot uses a one-two of perfectly contrasting similes: ‘Libertines are hideous spiders, that often catch pretty butterflies.’
Charles Dickens in "A Christmas Carol" uses extended metaphors to describe Ebenezer Scrooge: ‘The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas. External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, nor wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.’
George Orwell in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" describes the small room in which the protagonist Winston and his partner Julia could be themselves without the state spying on them as ‘a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.’
J.K. Rowling in "Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone" introduces the Dursleys: ‘Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.’
Jane Austen in "Emma" begins with: ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.’
Hanif Kureishi’s literary novel "Intimacy" begins with: ‘It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.’
Donna Tartt’s "The Secret History" begins with: ‘The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.’
Albert Camus starts "The Outsider" with: ‘Mother died today. Or yesterday. I don’t know.’
Jonathan Franzen, opens his literary masterpiece "The Corrections" with: ‘The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.’
Homer, in "The Iliad" begins with: ‘Rage! Sing, Goddess, [of] Achilles’ rage, black and murderous, that cost the Greeks incalculable pain, pitched countless souls of heroes into Hades’ dark, and left their bodies to rot as feasts for dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done. Begin with the clash between Agamemnon, the Greek warlord, and godlike Achilles.’
The opening line of the Communist Manifesto: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.’