"I slumber not." -22I love this line, and it is a great representation of how well Mitchell works the diary format. This is the last line of an entry, after finding out about an illness he had, and it is these small lines that make the writing so personal and honest.
"Amidst nebulous quilts & and summery pillows I lay..." -19
"Glass and peace alike betray proof of fragilty under repeated blows." -12
"The chapel creaked like an old tub & its congregation numbered little more than the digits of two hands, but no traveler ever quenced his thirst at a desert oasis more thankfully than Henry & I gave worship this morning." -8
"Rain squalls blow up from nowhere & with the same rapditiy & the deck hisses itself dry in a minute." -37The use of the ampersand in the first section was aesthetically effective, a very pleasant visual repitition. It's also very appropriate for it being a diary!
From St. Mawr (Kindle edition, so I need to use location/line number)
"That black fiery flow in the eyes of the horse was not 'attitude.' It was something much more terrifying, and real, the only thing that was real. Gushing from the darkness in menace and question, and blazing out in the splendid body of the horse." -307-10
"For the time, he was good, very good, dangerously good." -219
"Always this sense of morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privates, their dirty linen. Always this air of alertness for personal criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presupposes a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology." - 533-41That may be my favorite quote of them all! Crazy.
"Everything so intensely thrilling and so innerly wearisome." -553
"Everything so intensely thrilling and so innerly wearisome", can easily be applied to how you crack open each text for your readers. Keeping your writing, as Mitchel does, "so personal and honest", adds much texture to your posts at large. You have a keen sense of noticing carefully worked structure/sentence construction down to the bone.
ReplyDelete"The use of the ampersand in the first section was aesthetically effective, a very pleasant visual repetition. It's also very appropriate for it being a diary!"
Here's looking forward to older and newer posts, uncovering your detailed love for the art of the written word!