beautiful paragraphs

Someone on FB shared a Reddit thread of people posting their favorite sentences or paragraphs from literature. I don't know that I have a single favorite, but the first thing that jumped to mind was the opening of Primo Levi's story "A Tranquil Star."

Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far away from here, lived a tranquil star, which moved tranquilly in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of tranquil planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter's difficulties begin. We have written "very far," "big," "hot," enormous": Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It's clear that something in our lexicon isn't working. 

If in fact this story must be written, we must have the courage to eliminate all adjectives that tend to excite wonder: they would achieve the opposite effect, that of impoverishing the narrative. For a discussion of stars our language is inadequate and seems laughable, as if someone were trying to plow with a feather. It's a language that was born with us, suitable for describing objects more or less as large and long-lasting as we are; it has our dimensions, it's human. It doesn't go beyond what our senses tell us. Until two or three hundred years ago, small meant the scabies mite; there was nothing smaller, nor, as a result, was there an adjective to describe it. The sea and the sky were big, in fact equally big; fire was hot. Not until the thirteenth century was the need felt to introduce into daily language a term suitable for counting "very" numerous objects, and, with little imagination, "million" was coined; a little later, with even less imagination, "billion" was coined, with no care being taken to give it a precise meaning, since the term today has different values in different countries.

Not even with superlatives does one get very far: how many times higher than a high tower is a very high tower? Nor can we hope for help from disguised superlatives, like "immense," "colossal," "extraordinary": to relate the things that we want to relate here, these adjectives are hopelessly unsuitable, because the star we started from was ten times as big as our sun, and the sun is "many" times as big and heavy as our Earth, whose size so overwhelms our own dimensions that we can represent it only with a violent effort of the imagination. There is, of course, the slim and elegant language of numbers, the alphabet of the powers of ten: but then this would not be a story in the sense in which this story wants to be a story; that is, a fable that awakens echoes, and in which each of us can perceive distance reflections of himself and of the human race.

the golden compass and a poetry handbook

Mary Oliver's book is a paragon of clear writing. Makes me want to write poetry but evidently not enough to practice every day. Perhaps it's time to change that.

The Golden Compass is such a terrific story, with such vivid and wild characters. I read it in about three days this time around (I've lost track of how many times I've read it since Dad first read them out loud to us 15+ years ago) and, even knowing just what's coming at each twist and turn, I could hardly put it down. A few times, reading in bed, I said, "Oh fuck yeah!" or variants thereof, aloud to myself.

Taking a break now to read The Blind Assassin, which is okay so far if a little slow. Debating whether to leave Subtle Knife and Amber Spyglass for the beach and start into The Warmth of Other Suns and then Between the World and Me after I'm done with Atwood.

a favorite poem, which i come back to over and over

Musee des Beaux ArtsW. H. Auden About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

the remains of the day

Brilliant, a work of genius. To so profoundly inhabit the mind of an invented character that you can convey the character's lack of self-knowledge without beating the reader over the head with it, and while remaining humorous and enlightening throughout, is an astounding feat. Hard to believe the same man wrote this and The Buried Giant, which is both totally different and a messy mediocrity.