sartresue
Veteran
Joined: 18 Dec 2007
Age: 69
Gender: Female
Posts: 6,313
Location: The Castle of Shock and Awe-tism
26 Jan 2010, 7:55 pm
cosmiccat wrote:
Quoting dddhgg
Wow! Thanks for that link. Never thought I'd ever get to hear her voice. I did something interesting with the transcript of that reading, interesting to me, at least. I substituted "love" for "words' (or speech, language) and I think the two are amazingly interchangeable, at least in this particular piece, The result becomes a very good insight into the nature of love, and helps me to stay on topic.
I'll share a few paragraphs of Woolf's thoughts about words when transformed into thoughts about love.,
Love Fails Me
Thus to lay down any laws for such an irreclaimable vagabond is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on words of love. All we can say about love, as we peer at it over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which it lives – the mind – all we can say about it is that love seems to like people to think before they use love, and to feel before they use love, but to think and feel not about love, but about something different. Love is highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. Love does not like to have its purity or its impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure Love, it will show its resentment by starting another for impure Love – hence the unnatural violence of much modern love; it is a protest against the puritans. Love is highly democratic, too; it believes that one love is as good as another; uneducated love is as good as educated love, uncultivated love as good as cultivated love, there are no ranks or titles in love’s society. Nor does the word love like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. Words of love hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. Love hates being useful; love hates making money; love hates being lectured about in public. In short, love hates anything that stamps it with one meaning or confines it to one attitude, for it is love’s nature to change.
Perhaps that is love’s most striking peculiarity – the need of change. It is because the truth love tries to catch is many-sided, and love conveys it by being many-sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus love means one thing to one person, another thing to another person; love is unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that love survives. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow love its liberty. We pin it down to one meaning, the useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination…
I'm reading it now. He's got some amazing ideas, don't you think? (I left my computer at this point, went downstairs to get the mail, and found to my delight, that the second book of Storr's that I'd sent for had arrived, "Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka's Mice".
) What I find most interesting are his ideas about attachment and how if that is not possible, or hasn't happened for a variety of reasons, a child may and most often does, turn to solitude where he or she can create his own world of belonging, and that this seems to be the case with many of our most gifted artists, writers, musicians down through the ages. Kafka is a prime example of this, as pointed out by Storr. I turned to solitude at a very early age, at about 2 or 3 years, when I realized that I could not get what I needed from my mother, namely, security, the security of my mother's love. Whether or not this was actually true, or due to a glitch in my perception, doesn't alter the fact that I believed it to be true, and from that young age decided not to expect her to provide me with love and security, even though I endlessly continued to wish for it. I also decided at that point that I would have to provide those basic needs for myself, become my own mother, and eventually, or so it seems, a mother to everyone who, in my opinion, needed a mother. I even became known in my neigborhood as "Little Mother Hen" because I was always bringing home younger children who seemed lost and neglected, feeding them, giving them baths, putting clean clothes on them, teaching them. I wanted to become a pediatrician, but that never happened.
Quote:
You might also like the only preserved recording of her voice (1937): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8czs8v6PuI. Her voice is very "upper class", but also pleasant to listen to. And it fits her appearance quite well, I think.
Wow! Thanks for that link. Never thought I'd ever get to hear her voice. I did something interesting with the transcript of that reading, interesting to me, at least. I substituted "love" for "words' (or speech, language) and I think the two are amazingly interchangeable, at least in this particular piece, The result becomes a very good insight into the nature of love, and helps me to stay on topic.
I'll share a few paragraphs of Woolf's thoughts about words when transformed into thoughts about love., Love Fails Me
Thus to lay down any laws for such an irreclaimable vagabond is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on words of love. All we can say about love, as we peer at it over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which it lives – the mind – all we can say about it is that love seems to like people to think before they use love, and to feel before they use love, but to think and feel not about love, but about something different. Love is highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. Love does not like to have its purity or its impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure Love, it will show its resentment by starting another for impure Love – hence the unnatural violence of much modern love; it is a protest against the puritans. Love is highly democratic, too; it believes that one love is as good as another; uneducated love is as good as educated love, uncultivated love as good as cultivated love, there are no ranks or titles in love’s society. Nor does the word love like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. Words of love hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. Love hates being useful; love hates making money; love hates being lectured about in public. In short, love hates anything that stamps it with one meaning or confines it to one attitude, for it is love’s nature to change.
Perhaps that is love’s most striking peculiarity – the need of change. It is because the truth love tries to catch is many-sided, and love conveys it by being many-sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus love means one thing to one person, another thing to another person; love is unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that love survives. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow love its liberty. We pin it down to one meaning, the useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination…
Quote:
By the way, as you seem interested in Anthony Storr, have you already read "Solitude, A Return to the Self"? I really like his analysis of (voluntary) solitude as a largely positive and creative concept. It's influenced my thought quite a bit lately, in addition to Thoreau.
I'm reading it now. He's got some amazing ideas, don't you think? (I left my computer at this point, went downstairs to get the mail, and found to my delight, that the second book of Storr's that I'd sent for had arrived, "Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka's Mice".
) What I find most interesting are his ideas about attachment and how if that is not possible, or hasn't happened for a variety of reasons, a child may and most often does, turn to solitude where he or she can create his own world of belonging, and that this seems to be the case with many of our most gifted artists, writers, musicians down through the ages. Kafka is a prime example of this, as pointed out by Storr. I turned to solitude at a very early age, at about 2 or 3 years, when I realized that I could not get what I needed from my mother, namely, security, the security of my mother's love. Whether or not this was actually true, or due to a glitch in my perception, doesn't alter the fact that I believed it to be true, and from that young age decided not to expect her to provide me with love and security, even though I endlessly continued to wish for it. I also decided at that point that I would have to provide those basic needs for myself, become my own mother, and eventually, or so it seems, a mother to everyone who, in my opinion, needed a mother. I even became known in my neigborhood as "Little Mother Hen" because I was always bringing home younger children who seemed lost and neglected, feeding them, giving them baths, putting clean clothes on them, teaching them. I wanted to become a pediatrician, but that never happened.A beautiful sentiment topic
Thanks for sharing, CC. So right about Kafka. I will check out Storr's book.
I feel as if I am in a virtual book club.
27 Jan 2010, 5:16 am
27 Jan 2010, 5:30 am
27 Jan 2010, 5:57 am
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