Monthly Archives: September 2016

Classics Club Spin #14

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Sigh!  I usually get excited about the Classics Club Spin but this time, between my failures to finish my last spins and the load of books I already have on my plate, my enthusiasm is severely compromised.  I should pass …..

…….. however, if I can finish up some of my reads, I don’t have much planned after them, AND I’m always trying to concentrate on my Classics Club List.  So with these excuses in mind, I’m going to give it a whirl …..

The Rules for the spin are:
  1. Go to your blog.
  2. Pick twenty books that you’ve got left to read from your Classics Club list.
  3. Post that list, numbered 1 – 20, on your blog by next Monday.
  4. Monday morning, we’ll announce a number from 1 – 20.  Go to the list of twenty books you posted and select the book that corresponds to the number we announce.
  5. The challenge is to read that book by December 1st.


I used the random list organizer here to choose the 20 books from my master list.  Then I tweaked them, so my list ended up looking like this:
  1. We (1921) – Yevgeny Zamyatin
  2. Address to Young Men (363) – Saint Basil 
  3. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) – Jacob Burckhardt
  4. The History of Napoleon Buonoparte (1829) – John Gibson Lockhart
  5. The Well at the World’s End (1896) – William Morris
  6. The City of God (426) – Augustine 
  7. Ivanhoe (1820) – Sir Walter Scott
  8. Wives and Daughters (1864/66) – Elizabeth Gaskell 
  9. Dead Souls (1842) – Nikolai Gogol 
  10. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller (1979) – Italo Calvino
  11. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and a Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1775) – Johnson & Boswell
  12. Tartuffe (1669) – Molière
  13. Twenty Years After (1845) – Alexandre Dumas
  14. Framley Parsonage (1860-61) – Anthony Trollope
  15. On the Social Contract (1762) – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  16. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) – Ann Radcliffe
  17. The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) – Sigmund Freud 
  18. The Merchant of Venice (1596 – 1598) – William Shakespeare
  19. The Histories (450 – 420 B.C.) – Herodotus 
  20. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) – Jules Verne

Oh, Lord help me.  I left some BIGGIES on the list without changing them out.  I just hope the spin goes in my favour and misses them.  I’m sure I’ll be tense until Monday. 🙂

Best of luck everyone with your spin!



Jane Eyre ~ Chapters XXIII, XXIV & XXV

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Chapter XXIII

Midsummer arrives with a radiance that is breathtaking.  Jane is out walking and spies Rochester, but in spite to trying to avoid his notice, he spots her and asks her to accompany him.  The conversation begins with his alluding to her departure from Thornfield, which she takes to mean that he is referring to his impending marriage. With a playful cruelty, he teases her, until he reveals that she is his only love and therefore, his only bride.  At first, she shows disbelief, but finally is swept away by his emotion.  Yet there are hints of foreboding:

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How To Think About the Great Ideas Project

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I’ve been having some wonderfully deep conversations with friends lately about life, but have been frustrated because I’ve felt that I’ve lacked the depth of understanding to communicate certain ideas and insights to them.  Pablo Neruda says in one of his love poems:  “Between the lips and the voice something goes dying,” and I’ve felt very much this way.  Somehow inside I know what I want to say, only when I attempt to articulate it, I’m left with a discouraging feeling of the inadequacy of my communication.  So with these experiences in mind, I’ve decided to resurrect a project that I’ve had on the back-burner for some time now.

Drawing from Mortimer J. Adler’s classic TV series, How to Think About the Great Ideas takes 52 great ideas —- ideas that stem from the ancient world —- and examines them from a philosophical viewpoint.  Adler, a philosopher and educator, taught that we are all philosophers and to ignore that which stimulates our minds, diminishes us to the level of ants; ants do not require the medium of choice but humans do, and, therefore, it is important to always choose “in terms of ideas.”  In the world of ideas there are always new frontiers to explore and I think I’m ready to take that journey.

There are 52 ideas in all, so I’m thinking of posting one idea each week for one year. The first idea is “How To Think of Truth”.  Yikes, not a light topic to start with but here I go, adding another project to my set of unfinished ones.  Wish me luck and please feel free to join me if the impulse so moves you!!

 

 

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

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“Inside the great building of the Law Courts, during the interval in the hearing of the Melvinsky case, the members of the judicial council and the public prosecutor were gathered together in the private room of Ivan Yegorovitch Shebek, and the conversation turned upon the celebrated Krasovsky case.”

Wow!  My last Tolstoy novel read was War and Peace over two years ago and I’d forgotten the depth that Tolstoy could create within his stories with a clear, straight-forward narrative.  The Death of Ivan Ilyich appears to be merely a tale of the last days of a Russian court judge, yet Tolstoy brings the human condition into vivid and startling colours.

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Jane Eyre ~ Chapters XX, XXI & XXII

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Chapter XX

Jane hears a blood-curdling wail in the middle of the night and then frantic calls for Rochester’s assistance.  He comes to assure his guests, and Jane retreats back into her room, dresses and waits.  Somehow, she simply knows that she’ll be needed.  Sure enough, Rochester fetches her to a room where Mr. Mason is lying in bed obviously injured, his blood-soaked linens nearby and a bandage covering his arm and shoulder. Rochester’s request is for Jane to remain with the wounded man while he leaves to fetch a surgeon, and when Mr. Mason is finally patched up, he is dispatched ……. no, not killed but sent quickly away in a carriage at the break of dawn.  Rochester asks Jane to walk with him and then asks her obscure yet leading questions with regard to a mistake he may have made, and her judgement on it.  He then teases her about his impending marriage and departs.

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Here I Love You (Aquí Te Amo) by Pablo Neruda

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I anticipate summer every year because when it arrives I have weeks where I’m able to read, read, and then read again.  I usually get at least 7 books finished during summer. This summer I finished 2 books.  Usually this outcome would frustrate me but books were replaced with people this summer and everything was as it should be.  We made some wonderful new friends, re-connected with old ones, and hopefully helped everyone’s summer be a little more meaningful, as they did ours.  It was one of the best summers in a long while.  However, now that the blissful time is over, and life is beginning again, the feeling of frustration is looming because I have so many books on-the-go, none nearly finished, and on top of it all, I feel unfocussed.  Not to mention, because of both situations, my reviews have been dwindling.

So today, I’ve decided to step back into the enchanted summer memories and share a poem, that I discovered on vacation, by the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda.  So many of his poems bring in evocative images of the sea and nature, which are irresistible to me. And, of course, I spend most of the summer by the sea and nature, so it’s no wonder I feel an affinity with his poetry.

 

Pine Forest in Vyatka Province (1872)
Ivan Shishkin
source Wikiart

 

Here I Love You by Pablo Neruda
 
Here I love you.

 

In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.
The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.
Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Here I love you.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.
The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

 

 
Pablo Neruda
trans. W.S. Merwin

 

Sunset At Sea (1853)
Ivan Aivazovsky
source Wikiart
Aquí te amo by Pablo Neruda
Aquí te amo.
En los oscuros pinos se desenreda el viento.
Fosforece la luna sobre las aguas errantes.
Andan días iguales persiguiéndose.
Se desciñe la niebla en danzantes figuras.
Una gaviota de plata se descuelga del ocaso.
A veces una vela. Altas, altas, estrellas.
O la cruz negra de un barco.
Solo.
A veces amanezco, y hasta mi alma está húmeda.
Suena, resuena el mar lejano.
Este es un puerto.
Aquí te amo.
Aquí te amo y en vano te oculta el horizonte.
Te estoy amando aun entra estas frías cosas.
A veces van mis besos en esos barcos graves,
que corren por el mar hacia donde no llegan.
Ya me veo olvidado como estas viejas anclas.
Son más tristes los muelles cuando atraca la tarde.
Se fatiga mi vida inútilmente hambrienta.
Amo lo que no tengo. Estás tú tan distante.
Mi hastío forcejea con los lentos crepúsculos.
Pero la noche llena y comienza a cantarme.
La luna hace girar su rodaje de sueño.
Me miran con tus ojos las estrellas más grandes.
Y como yo te amo, los pinos en el viento,
quieren cantar tu nombre con sus hojas de alambre.

 

Sea View By Moonlight (1878)
Ivan Aivazovsky
source Wikiart

I absolutely love the image of the wind disentangling itself.  Neruda uses so few words but conveys the intricacy and greatness of the ocean ……..  the desolate feeling of not only the landscape, but of the absence of his lover.  Whom of us hasn’t know the ache of either unrequited love or the anguish that comes from the separation of love?  Yet he doesn’t leave the reader without encouragement:  still the night sings to him and he loves on.

My favourite line in this poem?  “Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.”  I can’t describe it, but I can feel it.  Amazing.

So this lovely poem was part of my minuscule summer reading, and I thought I’d share it, wrapping up a memory of the past to take into the future …..

 

The Oresteia ~ The Eumenides

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The Eumenides by Aeschylus
“I give first place of honor in my prayer to her
who of the gods first prophesied, the Earth; and next
to Themis, who succeeded to her mother’s place
of prophecy; so runs the legend; and in third
succession, given by free consent, not won by force, 
another Titan daughter of Earth was seated here. …..”

Time passes and Orestes arrives at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, still pursued by the Furies.  His conflict continues in tormenting unrelief and he appeals to Apollo for alleviation from his guilt.  He has avenged his father, but in doing so has murdered his mother.  Divine command has clashed with divine decree, and he is helpless to navigate his way through the maze of paradoxical possibilities.  The priestess, Pythia, is shocked to find him in the suppliant’s chair with a sword dripping with blood and the sleeping Furies surrounding him.  A spell has been placed upon them by Apollo so Orestes can travel unhampered to Athens, which he does after Apollo absolves him of complicity in his murder of Clytaemestra. But now he must seek Athena for a possible resolution to his dilemma.

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Jane Eyre ~ Chapters XVII, XVIII & XIX

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Chapter XVII

Jane feels Rochester’s absence keenly and disappointment bubbles up at the speculation he could be gone indefinitely.  But she gathers her senses and fights her emotions, bringing them under practical reign, and by the time they receive a letter from Mr. Rochester a fortnight later announcing his intent to return with a large party, she is composed.

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