4399. “I have promises to keep”
Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
And you try your best to keep them. Maybe even the ones you can’t remember making. Maybe even those the most.
Note: “Haunted for ever by the eternal mind” (Wordsworth, “Intimations” Ode).
4400. Self-Doubt for Adults
his inward objector
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
I just heard from mine. It’s been a while, and I’m glad to be in touch—especially since I see how he’s changed.
He used to come bearing threats that people would turn their back on me.
Now he’s come to ask me not to turn my back on them.
She owned that, considering every thing, she was not
absolutely without inclination for the party.
Jane Austen, Emma
There’s always some moving part within you that wants to take part in some party beyond.
Some nights (some scarred and scared nights), that’s the only flicker of light you feel.
Some nights (some sweet and starry nights), that’s the only proof of life you need.
Note: “past the circuit of the lamp’s thin flame” (Hart Crane, The Bridge).
4402. “compelled her to grace”
“You love me very, very much, Izz?” he suddenly asked.
“I do. …”
“More than Tess?”
She shook her head. “No,” she murmured: “not more than she.”
“How’s that?”
“Because nobody could love ’ee more than Tess did! … She
would have laid down her life for ’ee. I could do no more.” …
[T]he fascination exercised over her rougher nature
by Tess’s character compelled her to grace.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The girl can’t help herself. An awe as strong as any oath obliges her to tell the truth, even though telling it costs her everything she wants.
It’s a little like the love that provokes the girl’s awe in the first place: ready to give all.
Some of the best love going feels like that: like an imitation of love that never hopes to rise to the level of the love that it admires.
I mean, doesn’t what we call love sometimes come down to putting the interests of others above our own?
Note: “In boy; go first” (Shakespeare, King Lear).
4403. “impulses which she had not known before”
Rosamund had delivered her soul under impulses
which she had not known before.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
It always feels like the first time: the spirit that moves us to reach one another.
And it always feels like it doesn’t matter if it’s the last.
Note: “Magically escaped” (Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”).
4404. “There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men”
Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
One more, actually: the perfection of the power to tell them apart and then put them back together again.
Note: “Let me count the ways” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, “XLIII”).
4405. Reserve Army of Rescuers
You know the type—always true to his ancient habit of happening to be everywhere where he had no business (Dickens, Great Expectations). He’s always somewhere he doesn’t belong—except when he’s not: like when he’s rescuing the man whose ancient habit is to think him always somewhere he doesn’t belong.
Next time, the soul the suddenly salient loiterer saves may well be your own.
Note: “spare vivacity” (Great Expectations).
4406. The Charmed Cycle
The … philosophy of disillusion … he thinks all that a prejudice.
Walter Pater, “Sir Thomas Browne”
Sometimes, when you’re tired, all your enthusiasms feel like so many found-out fallacies, so many detected illusions (George Eliot), so many lost loves. But they’re never really lost. They’re more like idols gone idle in the twilight, ready at a morning’s notice to turn over and turn into better reasons for loving and believing than the ones you lost the night before.
Love that.
Note:
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.
(Emerson, “Give All to Love”)
4407. “Only he and his opponent … knew that he was being destroyed”
G.L.S.
It reminds one of all those equal and opposite situations where only two people know that one of them has kept the other from destruction: the one who did the saving and the one who did the getting saved.
Note: “Never forget what you have done …” (George Eliot, Middlemarch).
4408. Self-Reliance for Commoners
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and
would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to
conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature.
Emerson, “Self Reliance”
I don’t know anyone that self-confident (though I’ve seen a lot of people, myself included, act as if they were). The people I know, myself included, have to settle in with the next best strength: the power to live with the pang of knowing that there isn’t enough approval in all the world to ease the ache that wants it.
Note: “my true fate” (John Ashbery, “A Boy”).
Love only what … is destined for you.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
But how do you know what you’re destined to love, until you start to love it?
Note: “there’s both my hands, Miss” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend).
4418. “funny”
How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime.
Frank O’Hara, “Steps”
Like a quirky city or a crazy stretch, she doesn’t think she’s strange. That’s why she seems so funny. That’s how you fall in love.