Sounds about right.

 "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." - Dickens 1859

War and Peace quotes

"Pierre discerned in his friend that need that he himself knew only too well to become aroused and argue about some extraneous matter in order to stifle personal thoughts that were too painful."

"that summer languor, that content and discontent with the present to which one is particularly susceptible on a bright, hot day in town."

"A cricket was chirping in a crack as if to celebrate his victory over all the world."

"The absence of suffering, the satisfaction of one’s needs, and the consequent freedom of choice of one’s occupation, that is, one’s way of life, now seemed to Pierre to be unquestionably man’s highest happiness."

"With his sixty years’ experience he knew how much weight to attach to rumors, knew how apt men are, when they want something, to manipulate all the evidence so that it appears to confirm what they desire, and knew how readily they overlook whatever speaks against it."

War And Peace

that peculiar predilection of the dull-witted

"And Anatol, with that peculiar predilection of the dull-witted for any conclusion they have reached by their own reasoning, propounded the argument"

War And Peace

the portfolio of time

"...peering with steady blue eyes into the portfolio of time."

Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer

Tropic of Cancer -- Henry Miller quote

 "Lawyer, priest, doctor, politician, newspaperman—these are the quacks who have their fingers on the pulse of the world. A constant atmosphere of calamity. It's marvelous. It's as if the barometer never changed, as if the flag were always at half-mast. One can see now how the idea of heaven takes hold of men's consciousness, how it gains ground even when all the props have been knocked from under it. There must be another world beside this swamp in which everything is dumped pell-mell. It's hard to imagine what it can be like, this heaven that men dream about. A frog's heaven, no doubt. Miasma, scum, pond lilies, stagnant water. Sit on a lily pad unmolested and croak all day. Something like that, I can imagine." 

Tropic of Cancer — Henry Miller

Some Emily Dickinson on Black Friday.

 They say it's called "Black Friday" because it's the time when retailers finally go "in the black" and turn a profit. 

But it can also be, under the right circumstances, even blacker, and darker. Suppose it is overcast, and you have nothing to do on Black Friday. You're not at work, and although you imagine you can fill a spare day with productive or entertaining activity, you mostly sit around in your pajamas, unwashed, looking at the Internet. 

It isn't so much depressing, but melancholy. But can we make Black Friday even blacker? We can! How? Bring forth 

Emily Dickinson! (1830-1886)

Emily Dickinson was a shut-in who didn't give a rip about punctuation, titles, or anything else. Her poetry came from the Blackest of Fridays, an infinity-long afternoon of gloomy brooding unmatched in literature. Dickinson stared into the void and brought back reports such as this:

A Death blow is a Life blow to Some

Who, till they died, did not alive become;

Who, had they lived, had died but when

They died, Vitality begun.

Sip some chamomile tea and dwell on that for a minute. 

Oh, is it still just around two in the afternoon and this day is dragging on forever? 

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us! – don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know!

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring Bog!

Hm... still just a bleary overcast afternoon. Here's one more to make this Friday the Blackest Friday ever!

To help our bleaker parts

Salubrious hours are given,

Which if they do not fit for earth

Drill silently for heaven. 

"Salubrious!" What does that even mean? (it means "healthy")

And I give you this:

Did Emily Dickinson 

Smoke the Weed?

Did Emily Dickinson 

Do the Deed?

Did Emily Dickinson 

Travel Far

To spaced-out dimensions 

Beyond the Stars?

Did Emily Dickinson 

Trans-mutate?

Did Emily Dickinson 

Levitate?

Was Emily Dickinson a super-dimensional alien from a realm beyond our comprehension? We shall never know. But Google her image on the Inter-webs and decide for yourself. 

reading notes

From The Razor's Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham

Masterlink, Ruysbroek, 

Plotinus, Denis the Areopagite, Jacob Boehme, Meister Eckhart, "Eleven Thousand Virgins," Cologne

"The Alone to The Alone","Dark Night of The Soul", "The Ineffable", Brague (painter), Gaugin, Renoir, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb", Rastignac, Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, "A play of Masterlinck's", "Paolo and Francesca", Berenice(play), Tacitus, Racine (poet? playwrite?), Houdon's Voltaire, Spinoza, Aeschylus, lumbago, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Holderlin, Rilke, Rolla, Valasquez, El Greco, Veronal, "Seven veils of Ingorance", Spinoza, Valery (writer), Baudelaire, Rimibaud;

General:

thalassocracy, The Winged Victory of Samothrace, Pindar, Rabelaisian

"The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind."

The Best Two Paragraphs from The Island of Dr. Moreau (spoiler)

From the last chapter. The narrator has returned to London.

My trouble took the strangest form. I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert,—to show first this bestial mark and then that. But I have confided my case to a strangely able man,—a man who had known Moreau, and seemed half to credit my story; a mental specialist,—and he has helped me mightily, though I do not expect that the terror of that island will ever altogether leave me. At most times it lies far in the back of my mind, a mere distant cloud, a memory, and a faint distrust; but there are times when the little cloud spreads until it obscures the whole sky. Then I look about me at my fellow-men; and I go in fear. I see faces, keen and bright; others dull or dangerous; others, unsteady, insincere,—none that have the calm authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging up through them; that presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale. I know this is an illusion; that these seeming men and women about me are indeed men and women,—men and women for ever, perfectly reasonable creatures, full of human desires and tender solicitude, emancipated from instinct and the slaves of no fantastic Law,—beings altogether different from the Beast Folk. Yet I shrink from them, from their curious glances, their inquiries and assistance, and long to be away from them and alone. For that reason I live near the broad free downland, and can escape thither when this shadow is over my soul; and very sweet is the empty downland then, under the wind-swept sky.

When I lived in London the horror was well-nigh insupportable. I could not get away from men: their voices came through windows; locked doors were flimsy safeguards. I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me; furtive, craving men glance jealously at me; weary, pale workers go coughing by me with tired eyes and eager paces, like wounded deer dripping blood; old people, bent and dull, pass murmuring to themselves; and, all unheeding, a ragged tail of gibing children. Then I would turn aside into some chapel,—and even there, such was my disturbance, it seemed that the preacher gibbered “Big Thinks,” even as the Ape-man had done; or into some library, and there the intent faces over the books seemed but patient creatures waiting for prey. Particularly nauseous were the blank, expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did not dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone. And even it seemed that I too was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain which sent it to wander alone, like a sheep stricken with gid.

"dice, Venus, and the tavern!"

'"Poor purse ... How cruelly thou hast been gutted by dice, Venus, and the tavern!"'

-- The Hunchback of Notre Dame book VI chapter IV

description of "Resting Bitch Face" found in classic literature

Here is Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the mid 1850s, describing Resting Bitch Face (alternatively known as Bitchy Resting Face) in his book, The House of the Seven Gables

"Face to face with this picture, on entering the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came to a pause;regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion of the brow, which, by people who did not know her, would probably have been interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will.  But it was no such thing.  She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage, of which only a far-descended and time-stricken virgin could be susceptible; and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of her near-sightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her powers of vision as to substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one.

We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor Hepzibah's brow.  Her scowl,--as the world, or such part of it as sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly persisted in calling it,--her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dim looking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown with its ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression almost as unjustly as the world did.  "How miserably cross I look!" she must often have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herself so, by a sense of inevitable doom.  But her heart never frowned.  It was naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and palpitations; all of which weaknesses it retained, while her visage was growing so perversely stern, and even fierce."

Literature Quiz #16