a really beautiful passage from paradise lost with some gloss:
from adam, on the creation of eve, her beauty, and her inferiority:
“[God], stooping, opened my left side, and took
From thence a rib, with cordial spirits warm,
And life-blood-streaming fresh; wide was the wound,
But suddenly with flesh filled up and healed
[ … ]
Under his forming hands a creature grew,
Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair
That what seemed fair in all the world seemed now
Mean, or in her summed up, in her contained,
And in her looks, which from that time infused
Sweetness into my heart unfelt before,
And into all things from her air inspired
The spirit of love and amorous delight.
[ … ]
[I] must confess to find
In all things else delight indeed, but such
As, used or not, works in the mind no change,
Nor vehement desire—these delicacies
I mean of taste, sight, smell, herbs, fruits and flowers,
Walks, and the melody of birds; but here,
Far otherwise, transported I behold,
Transported touch; here passion first I felt,
Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else
Superior and unmoved, here only weak
Against of the charm of beauty’s powerful glance.
Or Nature failed in me, and left some part
Not proof enough such object to sustain,
Or, from my side subducting, took perhaps
More than enough—at least on her bestowed
Too much of ornament, in outward show
Elaborated, and of inward less exact.
For well I understand in the prime end
Of Nature her the inferior, in the mind
and inward faculties, which most excel.”
in the following passage raphael warns adam against only being in it for the sex:
“But, if the sense of touch, whereby mankind
Is propagated, seem such dear delight
Beyond all other, think the same vouchsafed
To cattle and each beast; which would not be
To them made common and divulged if aught
Therein enjoyed were worthy to subdue
The soul of Man or passion in him move.”
that is, if you think having sex is so special then why do cows do it?
chaos cupping
art film is essentially teleological: it tries in various ways to “wake the audience up” or render us more “conscious” [ … ] commercial film doesn’t seem like it cares very much about an audience’s instruction or enlightenment [ … ] you could say that a commercial movie doesn’t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it.”
— david foster wallace, “david lynch keeps his head,” published in a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again
so then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to not be liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? one clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. it’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. as hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “irony has only emergency use. carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” … irony is singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”
— david foster wallace, “e unibus pluram: television and us fiction,” published in a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again
But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving a part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.”
— Brideshead Revisited, 169
