Topical Guide 780
Mark Dorset
Allusion
Hope
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 67:
I’ve decided that my past and I have an inseparable relationship . . . but a flexible one. […] The past is prologue, and the prologue to a recipe is the list of ingredients at the top, and cooking is not like fresco-painting, where “erasures are not allowed.” It’s more like writing, where the power of revising allows you to scratch things out, touch things up, rearrange it all to suit yourself.
Andre Gide, Les Caves du Vatican (Lafacdio’s Adventures):
“You misunderstand me. In life one corrects oneself—one improves oneself—so people say; but one can’t correct what one does. It’s the power of revising that makes writing such a colorless affair—such a . . .” (He left his sentence unfinished.) “Yes! That’s what seems to me so fine about life. It’s like frescoe-painting—erasures aren’t allowed.”
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 67:
I kept pursuing her and calling her name, and she ran right out into the street, where she tripped and fell right into the gutter. She was a mess, and people burst out laughing, and the poor woman suddenly burst into laughter at herself! For a moment I thought that we might become friends, on the strength of this surprising ability to abstract herself from herself and laugh at herself […]
Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” translated by Jonathan Mayne:
To take one of the most commonplace examples in life, what is there so delightful in the sight of a man falling on the ice or in the street, or stumbling at the end of a pavement, that the countenance of his brother in Christ should contract in such an intemperate manner, and the muscles of his face should suddenly leap into life like a timepiece at midday or a clockwork toy? The poor devil has disfigured himself, at the very least; he may even have broken an essential member. Nevertheless the laugh has gone forth, sudden and irrepressible. It is certain that if you care to explore this situation, you will find a certain unconscious pride at the core of the laugher’s thought. That is the point of departure. “Look at me! I am not falling,” he seems to say.
The man who trips would be the last to laugh at his own fall, unless he happened to be a philosopher, one who had acquired by habit a power of rapid self-division and thus of assisting as a disinterested spectator at the phenomena of his own ego. But such cases are rare.
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 67:
Hope springs eternal, “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.” It’s a kind of narcotic. […] I remember a man who loved his wife, his dying wife, so much that he forced himself to hope when he was hopeless and desperate. I remember him standing at a window and administering hope to her […] and she gave back to him every ounce of hope that he gave her, compounded, made him believe that he was succeeding, that he was deceiving her, and they sailed the strangest sea, intoxicated by it.
Emily Dickinson:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all —
And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard —
And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm —
I’ve heard it in the chillest land —
And on the strangest Sea —
Yet — never — in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of me.
See also:
Allusion; Quotation TG 140, TG 455, TG 462, TG 502, TG 506, TG 532, TG 559, TG 583, TG 592, TG 626, TG 654, TG 657, TG 714, TG 735, TG 736, TG 738
Writing: Drafting TG 421; Revision: rewriting, revising, rethinking, renovating TG 10, TG 421; Writing (and Drawing): Drafting, Writing (and Drawing): Revising TG 421; Writing on Walls (Graffiti, Messages, Art) TG 479
Hope TG 574; Hopes and Fears TG 63; Hope versus Despair (or Fear) TG 109; Hopes and Dreams: The Big Break TG 674
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