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Day: 17 October 2010

And Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes, And Other Famous Last Lines

When I was still at the academia, I did a bit of research into the speeches from the scaffold. I studied 16th century, as you know, and it registered only few examples thereof. The interest was sparked partly, if I can recall, by the passage from Dostoevsky’s “Idiot” in which the count Myshkin contemplates the feelings of the person about to be executed.

The page to which I’d like to redirect you, however, has little to do with capital punishment. Michael Erins has meticulously assembled the famous last lines in literature from texts as different as Qu’ran and Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake”. The choice is fairly random but serves well to open up the topic of what, and why, makes for a good close to the story. Some examples, to wet your appetite:

1.) “and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Ulysses

Author: James Joyce

Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the conclusion of James Joyce’s literary epic recounts her first meeting with husband Leopold and how she realized her love for him in one exceptionally long passage.

4.) “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”.

The Great Gatsby

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 14 words, F. Scott Fitzgerald sums up one of the major themes of his quintessential novel of the jazz age – that of clinging so hard to the past that the present seems muddy and unfulfilling.

6.) “He loved Big Brother.”

1984

Author: George Orwell

Considered one of the most bone-chilling final lines in literary history, thoughtcriminal Winston Smith has once again become a brainwashed puppet of a totalitarian dystopia after an impassioned struggle for personal freedom.

18.) “He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.”

Things Fall Apart

Author: Chinua Achebe

After 25 chapters of postcolonial tragedy, author Chinua Achebe points an ironic, scathing, challenging eye back at the Europeans who tore to pieces a proud Nigerian tribe.

31.) “I have no children by which I can propose to get a good single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing.”

“A Modest Proposal”

Author: Jonathan Swift

Biting and hilarious, the greatest essay ever written about the benefits of eating babies concludes with a knee-slapper whereby the author excludes himself from any hypothetical economic sanctions.

41.) “God – people – people don’t do things like that.”

Hedda Gabler

Author: Henrik Ibsen

Proud Hedda Gabler commits suicide with her military father’s guns seemingly out of nowhere, shocking her understandably confused husband and friends.

Michael’s website on Masters in Education is dedicated to accumulating information and resources for everyone interested in this academic degree.

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph

I think I first read about Diane Arbus (1923-1971), when already in England. As Frank van Riper indicates in his article, she indeed is often introduced as someone who documented “the lives of the freaks“, with little else to go beyond that. Whilst it is possible to get too agreed with this image of Arbus, already her Aperture monograph has shown a complex artistic character through the numerous citations from Arbus’s talks and interviews. The book has provided my personal quotations notepad with many valuable additions, some of which I gathered in the post Diane Arbus: “The Gap Between Intention and Effect”. At the same time, studying the photos in the book and contemplating on the excerpts from her talks led to the lengthy philosophical meditation on the subject of human identities and language.

From the book:

“I suppose a lot of these observations are bound to be after the fact. I mean they’re nothing you can do to yourself to get yourself to work. You can’t make yourself work by putting up something beautiful on the wall or by knowing yourself. Very often knowing yourself isn’t really going to lead you anywhere. Sometimes it’s going to leave you kind of blank“.

“What’s thrilling to me about what’s called technique is that it comes from some mysterious deep place“.

“Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it. They become methods. It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again“.

“The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination, and I think it’s true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You’ve just got to choose a subject, and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough“.

 

My Home Library (The Books That Made Me)

I‘ve said before that, when I came to England, the thing that stood out the most was the absence of books anywhere on display in the house. The majority of houses I visited had books shelved somewhere away from the sight. You would see mirrors, paintings, ceramics, photos, but rarely many, if any, books.

My Moscow flat is small, and what you see is the so called “large room”, i.e. the living room, that also functions as a study and a bedroom, and on occasion – as a dining room. I’ve lived there since I was born, and ever since I’ve been surrounded with books. Admittedly, the books I was looking at when I was a kid are now in another room in a different bookcase. In the living room, however, most of the books were bought in the years after I became a student. More books stand on the shelves in the corridor.

What books are they? Having not looked at them for 7 years, I’m impressed and amazed at myself at the range of literature in front of my eyes. The most impressive thing is that I did actually read them. In no particular order, on those eight shelves you’ll find: Sigmund Freud; Nicholas Roerikh; Chinese, Greek and Roman philosophers; ancient Russian chronicles; the Russian language dictionary by Vladimir Dal’; encyclopedias of Symbolist movement, Music, Philology, Mythology, and Religion; history of erotic painting; Thomas Mommsen; Andre Mauroit; English, French, and German dictionaries; Bertrand Russell; Boris Pasternak; Mikhail Bulgakov; Domesday Book; Aldous Huxley; Franz Kafka; Victor Hugo; Gustav Flobert; and many, many others…

Looking at these books so many years later, I become aware of a few things. I realise that it is impossible to be ordinary when, as a child and teenager, you grow up surrounded by this wealth of human culture. I also see why my own mind is so panoptical yet capable of finding the common between different things. I can understand why I find it so easy to navigate between the topics and epochs; but I also see why sometimes I cannot tolerate the mental laziness in people.

Last but not least, I understand why for many people I come across as a serious, brainy, logical, realistic person, with little interest in emotional stuff. Although the image is far from truth, I realise why I so love Maugham’s “Theatre”. Julia Lambert may have been vain and pathetic on the scale of an ordinary woman and mother, almost a child; and she didn’t know much; but being distanced from the ordinary and free from knowledge allowed her to convey the deepest emotions and thus to be the best actress, to inspire people.

I know more than Julia, I am aloof and calm most of the time, and because of this people confide in me. Because I need “human material” for my own purposes, I don’t stop them. They tell me things they cannot tell anybody else. Instinctively, they suspect that I know enough to put them in the proper perspective, to relieve the burdensome feeling that they are complete misfits and to inspire them to lead their own lives. But would I be able to do this without compassion and empathy? Without passion for literature which is a synthetic art, in that it requires not only mental power but also emotional engagement in form of imagination and invites to see our emotional responses from the outside? Without knowledge of how similar people are and have always been?

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