I have been reading Earthly Powers...okay, aaand watching Tom Green shows on video...but I can't help it; I like spazzes who act insane, and the show is hitting a creative stride...but back to intellectuality, the Burgess novel is really good so far, and it's not nearly as long as I thought it was. It looked thicker than Brothers Karamazov (800+ pages) but it's only 400. Thick paper...
The novel is about an aged, retired novelist, Kenneth Toomey, who's being asked to help prove a dead pope is a saint, from his recollections of the pope saving a young meningitis victim's life through prayer decades back.
I like this passage where Toomey reflects on his sleeping lover, Geoffrey, who he had a gigantic argument with on that night, Toomey's 81st birthday:
"I felt for him none of the bitter resentful loathing I might properly, in spite of his eventual yielding to duty or fear, be expected to feel and, indeed, expected to feel. I felt only the general pity one always feels for the defenseless prisoner of sleep, seeing in him the defenseless prisoner of life. Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfullness. If that is contradiction, it is because human language disposes to contradiction. I told myself, untruthfully perhaps, that I knew the world and had learned tolerance. That it was too late for me to take human passion seriously, including my own. But I remembered saying something of that kind publicly at the age of 45. Give us peace in our time, whatever the time. Which logically meant throwing Geoffrey out. And then feeling no peace because of a lack of charity, of awareness that I was, all said and done, a dithering nuisance, a hypocrite, a prissy product of a bad period, ludicrous in my senile sensuality, everything that, in blunter language, Geoffrey had termed me. Let him sleep, let it all sleep."
The novel is about an aged, retired novelist, Kenneth Toomey, who's being asked to help prove a dead pope is a saint, from his recollections of the pope saving a young meningitis victim's life through prayer decades back.
I like this passage where Toomey reflects on his sleeping lover, Geoffrey, who he had a gigantic argument with on that night, Toomey's 81st birthday:
"I felt for him none of the bitter resentful loathing I might properly, in spite of his eventual yielding to duty or fear, be expected to feel and, indeed, expected to feel. I felt only the general pity one always feels for the defenseless prisoner of sleep, seeing in him the defenseless prisoner of life. Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfullness. If that is contradiction, it is because human language disposes to contradiction. I told myself, untruthfully perhaps, that I knew the world and had learned tolerance. That it was too late for me to take human passion seriously, including my own. But I remembered saying something of that kind publicly at the age of 45. Give us peace in our time, whatever the time. Which logically meant throwing Geoffrey out. And then feeling no peace because of a lack of charity, of awareness that I was, all said and done, a dithering nuisance, a hypocrite, a prissy product of a bad period, ludicrous in my senile sensuality, everything that, in blunter language, Geoffrey had termed me. Let him sleep, let it all sleep."
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Is that movie any good?
Humidity sucks my guitar strings' lives.