/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7966841]

how about a little bit of James Joyce to remind us of >tfw no gf

Also quotes thread I guess

When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he halted and looked along the river towards Dublin, the lights of which burned redly and hospitably in the cold night. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame. He knew that the prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name.

[Anonymous No.7966886]

Posting one of my favorite passages from The Tunnel.

"Walking along the edge of the river, I no longer saw those lovely pale leaves pass me like petals, as if some river flower were blooming oddly out of season (poetry appearing abruptly in my social prose); rather I took them to be elements of a threatening metaphor, because I had suddenly seen that the world was held together only by frost and freezing, by contraction, that its bowels contained huge compressors and ice-cold molds; so the place where I stood looking over a trivial Indiana landscape--snow freshly falling upon an otherwise turgid, uninteresting stream--was actually a point on the hazardous brink of Being. Consequently there appeared before me an emblem of all that was--all that was like a freezing fog--exhaust from the engines of entropy; and I saw in the whitened leaves floating by me an honesty normally missing from Nature's speech, because this adventitious coating threw open the heart of the Law: this scene of desolation--relieved only by the barren purity of the trees--this wedge was all there was; and then I understood that the software lull of August water was but a blanket on a snowbank; the dust that a wave of wind would raise was merely the ash of a dry summer blizzard; the daffodils which would ring our Chinese elm were blooming spikes of ice, encased in green like a thug's gloves; there was just one season; and when the cottonwoods released their seeds, I would see smoke from the soul of the cold cross the river on the wind to snag in the hawthorns and perish in their grip like every love."

[Anonymous No.7966908]

>>7966886
sounds like a smart acid casualty kid describing his last walk in the woods, but I mean that in a good way

[Anonymous No.7967029]

he captures > tfw gf pretty well as well

A little lamp with a white china shade stood upon the table and its light fell over a photograph which was enclosed in a frame of crumpled horn. It was Annie's photograph. Little Chandler looked at it, pausing at the thin tight lips. She wore the pale blue summer blouse which he had brought her home as a present one Saturday. It had cost him ten and elevenpence; but what an agony of nervousness it had cost him! How he had suffered that day, waiting at the shop door until the shop was empty, standing at the counter and trying to appear at his ease while the girl piled ladies' blouses before him, paying at the desk and forgetting to take up the odd penny of his change, being called back by the cashier, and finally, striving to hide his blushes as he left the shop by examining the parcel to see if it was Securely tied. When he brought the blouse home Annie kissed him and said it was very pretty and stylish; but when she heard the price she threw the blouse on the table and said it was a regular swindle to charge ten and elevenpence for it. At first she wanted to take it back, but when she tried it on she was delighted with it, especially with the make of the sleeves, and kissed him and said he was very good to think of her.

Hm!...

He looked coldly into the eyes of the photograph and they answered coldly. Certainly they were pretty and the face itself was pretty. But he found something mean in it. Why was it so unconscious and ladylike? The composure of the eyes irritated him. They repelled him and defied him: there was no passion in them, no rapture. He thought of what Gallaher had said about rich Jewesses. Those dark Oriental eyes, he thought, how full they are of passion, of voluptuous longing!... Why had he married the eyes in the photograph?

He caught himself up at the question and glanced nervously round the room. He found something mean in the pretty furniture which he had bought for his house on the hire system. Annie had chosen it herself and it reminded him of her. It too was prim and pretty. A dull resentment against his life awoke within him. Could he not escape from his little house? Was it too late for him to try to live bravely like Gallaher? Could he go to London? There was the furniture still to be paid for. If he could only write a book and get it published, that might open the way for him.

[Anonymous No.7967084]

Whenever I read Araby it always hits me with Tfw no gf Tfw no friends Tfw not of a higher social standing

[Anonymous No.7967325]

>>7967029
>>7967084
yeah Dubliners captures existential anxiety pretty well, it's my first Joyce so far (yes, moderately newfag on /lit/) and if anything the pleasure of reading such good prose is caught up by the depression it induces... Is Ulysses too big a piece to read next or should I just go for it?

[Anonymous No.7967376]

>>7967325
Read the odyssey and portrait of the autist first.

[Anonymous No.7967395]

>not thinking Eveline is the best story

[Anonymous No.7967788]

>>7967395
>What is The Dead

[Anonymous No.7967891]

>>7967084
way to miss the point fucktard

[Anonymous No.7967900]

>>7967325
putting it on the list.