Paragraphs To Treasure

[Edge]

Here's the concept: post a paragraph - maybe something that struck you because of its' exceptional wit/profundity/poignancy/malignancy/stupidity/whatever... or maybe a fragment of something you wrote yourself.

I'll kick off with something Dragonlily shared with me - I love the sparkling wit and sly humour, and it makes me want to read the book.

[Nigel] rang the bell and was admitted into a hall which would have been enormous but for the acute feeling of claustrophobia imparted by a whole herd of stags’ heads that seemed to be breathing in concert down one’s neck. The supercilious expression on their faces was repeated on that of the butler: indeed, fitted out with moth-eaten hair and a good pair of horns, his head could have been mounted on the wall and no one any the wiser. Ponsonby, having expressed his gratification at Mr. Strangeway’s presence amongst them again and given the weather a pontifical but qualified blessing, proceeded suavely as a crank-shaft in oil towards the morning-room door. As some geologist, lost, starving and distraught amongst the Himalayan ranges, might rush at the side of a mountain and assault it with his little hammer, so Nigel felt an insane desire to strike a spark of humanity out of the butler. He clutched his elbow and hissed melodramatically: “Terrible doings at the Dower House, Ponsonby! Mr. O’Brien has been found shot. He is dead. We expect the worst.” A flaw, no larger than the chipping of a geologist’s hammer on the Himalayan ranges, appeared on the butler’s face.

- Nicholas Blake, 'Thou Shell Of Death'

[Dragonlily]

Here's another one I sent to Edge, because it fit with what he was doing at the time. I'm not putting it in quote format, because the smaller print is harder to read in these closely written paragraphs.
This comes from Dorothy Sayer's MURDER MUST ADVERTISE:

As soon as the new proof arrived from the printer's, Mr. Tallboy sent it down to the Conference Room by a boy, and escaped, if he could, for his elevenses. Mr. Toule or Mr. Jollop then pointed out to Mr. Pym and Mr. Armstrong a great number of weaknesses in both sketch and copy. Mr. Pym and Mr. Armstrong, sycophantically concurring in everything the client said, confessed themselves at a loss and invited suggestions from Mr. Toule (or Mr. Jollop). The latter, being, as most clients are, better at destructive than constructive criticism, cudgelled his brains unto stupor, and thus reduced himself to a condition of utter blankness, upon which the persuasiveness of Mr. Pym and Mr. Armstrong could work with hypnotic effect. After half an hour of skilled treatment, Mr. Jollop (or Mr. Toule) found himself returning with a sense of relief and refreshment to the rejected lay-out. He then discovered that it was really almost exactly what he required. It only needed the alteration of a sentence and the introduction of a panel about gift-coupons. Mr. Armstrong then sent the layout again to Mr. Tallboy, with a request that he would effect these necessary alterations. Mr. Tallboy, realizing with delight that these involved nothing more drastic than the making of a new lay-out and the complete rewriting of the copy, sought out the copy-writer whose initials appeared on the original type-script, instructing him to cut out three lines and incorporate the client's improvements, while he himself laid the advertisement out afresh.

[Fist and Faith]

Here's one. I'm sure I'll have more. From Hesse's Magister Ludi. (Should be The Glass Bead Game, since his title for it is Das Glasperlenspiel.)

I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

[Dragonlily]

The Hollow Man, John Dickson Carr

'Of course [ghost stories] can be written nowadays, and there are more brilliant people to write 'em - if they would. The point is, they are afraid of the thing called Melodrama. So, if they can't eliminate the melodrama, they try to hide it by writing in such an oblique, upside-down way that nobody under heaven can understand what they are talking about. Instead of saying flat out what the character saw or heard, they try to give Impressions. It's as though a butler, in announcing guests at a ball, were to throw open the drawing room doors and cry: "Flicker of a top hat, vacantly seen, or is it my complex fixed on the umbrella stand faintly gleaming?" Now, his employer might not find this satisfactory. He might want to know who in blazes was calling on him. Terror ceases to be terror if it has to be worked out like an algebra problem. It may be deplorable if a man is told a joke on Saturday night and suddenly bursts out laughing in church next morning. But it is much more deplorable if a man reads a terrifying ghost story on Saturday night, and two weeks later suddenly snaps his fingers and realizes that he ought to have been scared.'

[Lady Revel]

"The new villa was enormous, a tall, square Venetian mansion, with faded daffodil-yellow walls, green shutters and a fox-red roof. It stood on a hill overlooking the sea, surrounded by unkept olive-groves and silent orchards of lemon and orange trees. The whole place had an atmosphere of ancient melancholy about it; the house with its cracked and peeling walls, its tremendous echoing rooms, its verandahs piled high with drifts of last year’s leaves and so overgrown with creeper and vines that the lower rooms were in a perpetual green twilight; the little walled and sunken garden that ran along one side of the house, its wrought-iron gates scabby with rust, had roses, anemones and geraniums sprawling across the weed-grown paths, and the shaggy, untended tangerine-trees were so thick with flowers that the scent was almost overpowering; beyond the garden the orchards were still and silent, except for the hum of bees and an occasional splutter of birds among the leaves."

From My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell.

[The Leper Messiah]

When she opened her eyes, she saw sunlight, green leaves and a man's face. She thought: I know what this is. This is the world as she had expected to see it at sixteen - and now she had reached it - and it seemed so simple, so unastonishing, that the thing she felt was like a blessing pronounced upon the universe by means of three words: But of course.
She was looking up at the face of a man who knelt by her side, and she knew that in all the years behind her, THIS was what she would have given her life to see: a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt. The shape of his mouth was pride, and more: it was as if he took pride in being proud. The angular planes of his cheeks made her think of arrogance, of tension, of scorn - yet the face had none of these qualities, it had their final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainty, and the look of ruthless innocence which would not seek forgivness or grant it. It was a face that had nothing to hide or escape, a face with no fear of being seen or of seeing, so that the first thing she grasped about him was the intense perceptivness of his eyes - he looked as if his faculty of sight were his best loved tool and its excercise was limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted a superlative value to himself and to the world - to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing. It seemed to her for a moment that she was in the pressence of a being who was pure coinsciousness - yet she had never been so aware of a mans body. The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt,tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-coper alloy, the color of his skin blending with the chestnut-brown of his hair, the loose strands of the hair shading from brown to gold in the sun, and his eyes completing the colors, as they one part of the casting left undimmed and hardly lustrous: his eyes were the deep, dark green of light glinting on metal. He was looking down on her with the faint trace of a smile, it was not a look of discovery, but of familiar contemplaton - as if he, too, were seeing the long-expected and the never-doubted.
This was her world, she thought, this was the way men were meant to be and to face their exsistance - and all the rest of it, all the years of ugliness and struggle were only someone's sensless joke. She smiled at him, as if to a fellow conspirator, in relief, in deliverence, in radiant mockery of all the things she would never have to consider important again. He smiled in answer, it was the same smile as her own, as if he felt what she felt and new what she meant.
"We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?" She whispered.
"No, we never had too".

And so in reading this part of Ayn Rands, Atlas Shrugged, I finally found out who John Galt is!!! Its very clear that he is the Anti-Thomas Covenant

[lucimay]

[Dragonlily]

I haven't read that book in years, but I recognized the section within a few lines. Great choice, Leper Messiah.

[Fist and Faith]

Another person who's read Atlas Shrugged!!! WOO HOO!!

[lucimay]

i've read it too, Fist, as well as Fountainhead. doesn't everybody have an Ayn Rand period? (kinda like a Herman Hesse period)

[Sorus]

i've read it too, Fist, as well as Fountainhead. doesn't everybody have an Ayn Rand period? (kinda like a Herman Hesse period)

I think mine lasted about two months; five days to read most of Atlas Shrugged, the remaining time to finish the final hundred or so pages.

For all that, I do intend to read it again one of these days.

[Fist and Faith]

i've read it too, Fist, as well as Fountainhead. doesn't everybody have an Ayn Rand period? (kinda like a Herman Hesse period)

I think mine lasted about two months; five days to read most of Atlas Shrugged, the remaining time to finish the final hundred or so pages.

Sounds about right!

For all that, I do intend to read it again one of these days.

Me too.

The Leper Fairy read Fountainhead - possibly twice now? - but not yet Atlas Shrugged. I've tried to talk her into it a couple times. I can't say how much I love Atlas. I only read it a few years ago, and it taught me a lot! I thought a non-SRD Dissection would be cool, and Atlas was among the choices I suggested. It got some attention, but it didn't win. (Dune was chosen, but, alas, there was extremely little participation after the voting. )

And, with no remorse for what might be considered an attempt to turn this into an Atlas Shrugged thread, here's a few more great paragraphs.

"I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine, as I love my ability to work, as I love the act of sight and knowledge, as I love the action of my mind when it solves a chemical equation or grasps a sunrise, as I love the things I've made and the things I've felt, as my product, as my choice, as a shape of my world, as my best mirror, as the wife I've never had, as that which makes all the rest of it possible: as my power to live."

He was smiling, but she saw the enormous solemnity of that which he and his wife had needed to earn their right to this kind of smile. "She can live through it, Miss Taggart, because we do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it - and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life."

Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy's mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler's caution, who had obeyed with a zealot's fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene, protecting his unhardened body from germs - then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think. Had she fed him tainted refuse, he thought, had she mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal.

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly - yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

[The Leper Messiah]

Lucimay wrote:
i've read it too, Fist, as well as Fountainhead. doesn't everybody have an Ayn Rand period? (kinda like a Herman Hesse period)

I agree that everyone has an Ayn Rand period and flirts with Objectivism, it lasts exactly as long as you can stay objective about the world around you, which for most, is not very long. I really enjoyed that passage the first time I read it, she was transported to a very different kind of Land than the one we are used too. You almost cant compare the two. Her writting is important to look at things from a different point of view and her view of the world can open up some very interesting new ways of thinking. I agree that Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead are both 'must reads'. Ill never look at architecture the same way again, after reading the Fountainhead.

[The Leper Messiah]

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly - yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

I like this part Fist and Faith. How very true it is. Ayn had some very interesting ideas about education.

[Fist and Faith]

I agree that everyone has an Ayn Rand period and flirts with Objectivism, it lasts exactly as long as you can stay objective about the world around you, which for most, is not very long.

Yeah, if only the people of the mind in our world were as good as Roarke, Galt, Dagny, and Rearden. What a world it would be if people felt that things like self-worth, self-fulfillment, and accomplishment were incompatible with cheating and not earning everything you have. But she made some very strong points by using such paragons.