Hivern, tardor

El fred d'aquest dies em fan pensar en l'abric que embolcalla l'home de "Ya no hay pena", que camina per Barcelona i rep cleques a tort i a dret. Sort que avui hem tingut una petita treva. La combinació d'ahir, de fred i pluja, la vaig trobar molt mal intencionada. No sé qui ho va organitzar, però si pogués redactaria una reclamació formal.

Crítica impura de la poètica novel·lística

La novel·la és un calaix de sastre des del seu naixement, per tant fer-ne una definició voldrà dir no dir res (si és massa general) o excloure moltes obres importants (si és una definició molt restrictiva), per això Maugham és potser una mica massa injust amb Forster, però vaja, la sensació que descriu la conec.

"I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr. E.M. Forster from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr E.M. Forster..."

Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

Only connect...

"I opened Walt Whitman for a quotation, & he started speaking to me. That the unseen is justified by the other... That the spiritual world might be robust - ! ... No more fighting, please, between the soul & the body, until they have beaten their common enemy, the machine."

E.M.Forster, Diary, 16 june 1908

Obtuseness

"Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted and human love will be seen at its hihghest. Live in fragments no longer. (...) Nor was the message difficult to give. (...) But she failed. For there was one quality in Henry for which she was never prepared: his obtuseness. He simply did not notice things and ther was no more to be said."

(E.M.Forster, Howards End, p.188)

Overrated

"Tibby sighed and felt it rather hard that because of his open mind, he should be empanelled to serve as a juror. He had never been interested in human beings, for which one must blame him, but he had had rather too much of them at Wickham Place. Just as some people cease to attend when books are mentioned. so Tibby's attention wandered when "personal relations" came under discussion. Ought Margaret to know what Helen knew the Basts to know? Similar questions had vexed him from infancy, and at Oxford he had learned to say that the importance of human beings has been vastly overrated by specialists"

(E.M.Forster, Howards End, p.250)

Neglected roads

"Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches taht have never joined into a man. (...) Happy the man who sees from either aspect the gory of those outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall fin easy going.
It was hard going in the roads of Mr Wilcox's soul. From boyhood he had neglected them."

(E.M.Forster, Howards End, p.187)

Madness or sensibleness

"That's foolish. In the first place, I disagree about the outer life. Well, we've often argued that. The real point ist that there is the widest gulf between my love-making and yours. Yurs was romance; mine will be prose. I'm not running it down- a very good kind of prose, but well considered, well thought out. For instance, I know all Mr Wilcox's faults. He's afraid of emotion. He cares too much about success, too little about the the past. His sympathy lacks poetry, and so isn't sympathy really. I'd even say" ─ [Margaret] looked at the shinning lagoons─ that, spiritually, he is not as honest as I am. Doesn't satisfy you?"
"No, it doesn't," said Helen, "It makes me feel worse and worse. You must be mad."

(E.M.Forster, Howards End, p.177)

refree - el reloj

"cientos de cosas se van, las pocas que quedan están sin cerrar
porque tú cuentas historias sin ningún final
tú que pones los labios y miras hacia atrás
tú que guardas tu risa para los demás"

catching the train

"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning. A meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."

Virginia Woolf, 1937

Atonement

Something that she did not understand took hold of the girl and pulled her through. Though the vision was over, and she had returned to the insipidity of the world, she remembered what she had learnt. Atonement and confession- they could wait. It was in hard prosaic tones that she said: "I withdraw everything".

(E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1924)