The Anchoress has a
post up about the 1-2-3 meme. Here are the rules:
1. Pick up the book nearest your hand ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
The Serpentine one and I both did it. The closest book for me, not surprisingly, was my missal. At first I wanted to cheat and go for something more romantic but I played honestly and I got:
It is written: The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve." Then the devil left him and, behold, angels came and ministered to him. The Gospel of the Lord.
The Serpentine One got a more intriguing, though utterly confusing out of context, result:
He had always to be committing some action, whether or not it bore any relation to any he had committed before or was to commit afterwards, and his reasoning self spent most of its time trying to pull these unrelated actions into some sort of coherence. Though his family were good simple Barking stuff, his anxiety to bring his disordered self safe through these storms it raised had given him a nervous glittering smartness: and he had a glittering eye, too, as he told his stories. He was an Ancient Mariner who had never made the trip with the Albatross.
You just want to know more don't you? I do. It's from
The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West.
"Rubrics are printed in a fine italic type, while the text is composed of larg upper-case roman. The printing, on wove paper, sets a new standard for excellence, and Baskervillle pointed the way to the development of the modern Prayer Book.
ReplyDeletePrinted books in general in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, as we have seen, extremely expensive to produce and to purchase."
Wow. Possibly the dullest three sentences in the book. Amazing!
Hmm? The Oxford Guide to the BCP*. That's pretty serious reading there.
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me, I meant to say something about your remarks on Thee, thy, thou et cetera. Perhaps tomorrow.
* I'd like to say I guessed James Bond style—why this is Peruvian coffee picked by a one legged man in May—but it got exactly one hit on Google.
He is desperately in search of her presence. Yet, the more we read the more we realise the truth about his emotional state. The futile questions shouted in the air are returned with deadening silence:
ReplyDeleteFlower and blossom, tell me do you know of her?
Have the rocks hidden her voice?
The closest book at hand was "Investment Funds in Canada". Not becuase I'm reading it, but because I'm a bad housekeeper--I was done with it in January! Fortunately, its numbering is by chapter. So I posted the book I actually read from today, yesterday & etc., and have been carting around with me lately.
ReplyDeleteOoh - I knew it was Rebecca West. The sentence about the albatross totally gives her away.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of R. West, have you read The Return of the Soldier yet?
My book is Explaining Imagism: The Imagist Movement in Poetry and Art.
For some reason all the library copies of The Return of the Soldier are out and I'm too much of a cheapskate to buy it. When it becomes available, I'm first in line according to the computer.
ReplyDeleteExplaining imagism? That's a tall order.
An odd thought, out of context like that, the line
ReplyDelete"He is desperately in search of her presence."
Sounds poetic enough to be a line in the Fletcher poem.
I wonder why someone writing prose would say, he is desperately in search of her presence, instead of he desperately wanted to be with her or see her or some such thing.
He's a Russian writing in English - this might be part of it.
ReplyDeleteAlso it might simply be the case that when working closely with poetry it rather rubs off and one has poetic moments oneself. I think it has happened to me and perhaps that's what has happened here.