There's a lot of books that I love. Usually when someone asks me for my absolute favourite I go for The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, because it sort of has everything I love (well-written, nerdy, murder mystery, crazy-ass church things, mentions of Abelard etc), but that's not the book I want to talk about today. I was thinking about how all art forms can make the world a more beautiful place, and there are certainly some books that have done this for me. One of the first books that really wowed me because of the beauty of language is Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werther).
The book is a series of letters that Werther sends to his friend Wilhelm, he mainly talks about the village he is staying at and about the girl he falls in love with, Lotte. And really, nothing much happens in the book at all but you don't even notice, because Goethe was such an extraordinary writer. You get dragged into the story and into the emotions and the love, and for me the book was nearly impossible to put down. The language is very colourful and I know there will be plenty of people who find it overly flamboyant but well, that just sucks for them.
I know that the book promted copycat suicides (Werther effect anyone?) and the story is incredibly sad, Werther is a miserable young man, but still, I find the book to be of almost unparalleled beauty. Here are some passages that I love (difficult to pick any, every page is quotable!):
In other respects I am very well off here. Solitude in this terrestrial paradise is a genial balm to my mind, and the young spring cheers with its bounteous promises my oftentimes misgiving heart. Every tree, every bush, is full of flowers; and one might wish himself transformed into a butterfly, to float about in this ocean of perfume, and find his whole existence in it.
[...]
In vain do I stretch out my arms toward her when I awaken in the morning from my weary slumbers. In vain do I seek for her at night in my bed, when some innocent dream has happily deceived me, and placed her near me in the fields, when I have seized her hand and covered it with countless kisses. And when I feel for her in the half confusion of sleep, with the happy sense that she is near, tears flow from my oppressed heart; and, bereft of all comfort, I weep over my future woes.
[...]
Oh, the brilliant wretchedness, the weariness, that one is doomed to witness among the silly people whom we meet in society here! The ambition of rank! How they watch, how they toil, to gain precedence! What poor and contemptible passions are displayed in their utter nakedness! We have a woman here, for example, who never ceases to entertain the company with accounts of her family and her estates. Any stranger would consider her a silly being, whose head was turned by her pretensions to rank and property; but she is in reality even more ridiculous, the daughter of a mere magistrate's clerk from this neighbourhood. I cannot understand how human beings can so debase themselves.
[...]
I turned my sorrowful eyes toward a favourite spot, where I was accustomed to sit with Charlotte beneath a willow after a fatiguing walk. Alas! it was covered with water, and with difficulty I found even the meadow. And the fields around the hunting-lodge, thought I. Has our dear bower been destroyed by this unpitying storm? And a beam of past happiness streamed upon me, as the mind of a captive is illumined by dreams of flocks and herds and bygone joys of home! But I am free from blame. I have courage to die! Perhaps I have,—but I still sit here, like a wretched pauper, who collects fagots, and begs her bread from door to door, that she may prolong for a few days a miserable existence which she is unwilling to resign.
If you're interested in reading it, you can actually find it online at the Project Gutenburg here.
I grew up in a town about a 40 minute bike ride from the sea. Although it was so close, I didn't go there that often. I'm not a beach-person, and I don't like busy places. But sometimes, when it's not that hot, when it's late in the evening, there's nothing more relaxing and comforting than the sea. This is perhaps strange, because the sea is not necessarily calm, it is vast and uncontrollable, it could and would easily kill me. But I love the sea, I love wading in it, I love staring at it, I love dissapearing in the face of such great water.
I think that part of my love for Iris Murdoch comes from my love of the sea. The sea, or at least water, is a bit of a leitmotif in quite a few of her books, and her descriptions really resonate with me. Here are my two favourite examples;
“She came down to the edge of the sea, stepping into the strong running foam. The sea now seemed to be above her, a ragged wall of grey sliding curves and boiling white crests. A cold light as of its own making hung over the sea, a mist of instantly dissolving spray caught by some dull gleam from the rain-filled sky above. Not far out now, the tall weaves were breaking with a reocious booming sound, smashing themselves into the curling racing waters which rushed forward and as wildly receded.” (The Green Knight)
"The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life." (The Sea, The Sea)
“What strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes —any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.
[…]
I wished that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst —burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth, I didn’t repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What’ the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a…divine composure), hasn’t actually accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.
[…]
And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great —that is for ‘great men’; and it’s ‘silly’. Besides, you’ve written a little, but in secret. And it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn’t go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty —so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time….
[…]
Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. Our naphtha will spread, throughout the world, without dollars - black or gold - nonassessed values that will change the rules of the old game.
[…]
The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable. It is still unexplored only because we’ve been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable. And because they want to make us believe that what interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack. And we believed. They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss. That would be enough to see half the world laughing, except that it’s still going on. For the phallogocentric sublation is with us, and it’s militant, regenerating the old patterns, anchored in the dogma of castration. They haven’t changed a thing: they’ve theorized their desire for reality! Let the priests tremble, we’re going to show them our sexts!
Too bad for them, if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren’t men, or that the mother doesn’t have one. But isn’t this fear convenient for them? Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and laughing.”
