Hunting for an old will to share with a lawyer seeking a form, I stumbled on some of my old papers from grad school. I still like the opening of “To the Lighthouse and Critical Narrative.”
An eccentric but curious endeavor would be to assemble an abridgement of a great work out of its various critical studies, by piecing together all the quotations from it. We have no other way to know some ancient masterpieces; a pedant’s fortunate citation is all we possess of some poems of Sappho and tragedies of Aeschylus; and after the old fashion of constructing and then half-demolishing Gothic abbeys in the English countryside, perhaps some decadent scholar might one day give us a reconstruction of Wordsworth’s lost Prelude or the collected fragments of Middlemarch. Such an exercise in paraphilology would in fact resemble what critics already do when writing about texts. By virtue of being quoted, an excerpt becomes important; by virtue of being quoted often, it becomes exemplary.
That was for Mary Ann Caws (whose son is the lead singer for Nada Surf, Wikipedia tells me). To the Lighthouse is, incidentally, the finest book ever.
good stuff. and thanks for the dreamy model pic the other day. my reading digest was slow about your new tv show. pro kgb? free pussy riot!. Just kidding, but seriously, free Pussy Riot!!
Free Pussy Riot!
Long live the periodic sentence!
(The merits aren’t purely compositional, of course, but a pleasure to read on those grounds nonetheless.)
Lines Written In Early Spring has always been one of my favorites, primarily because of this stanza:
“To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.”
I’m a dumbass. I thought you were referencing Wordsworth.
Good poem tho.