Blog

Tag: modern literature

  • October 2nd, 2012 3:28pm

    Despite the inferiority of her instrument the performer tried with some success to suggest the appropriate orchestral effects. She rendered with brilliant precision the violin scales in the great crescendo. She played with fastidious reverence, lingering faithfully over every significant detail of the structure, humbly and ceremoniously exhibiting it, like a priest elevating the sacred host. What story did the music tell? It told of two forces, two enraptured lovers reaching out toward each other in suffering and ecstasy and embracing in a convulsive mad desire for eternity, for the absolute…The prelude blazed to its consummation and died down. She stopped at the point where the curtain parts and continued to gaze silently at the music.

    — Thomas Mann – “Tristan”

  • October 2nd, 2012 1:13am

    A writer who had for a few weeks been passing his time in Einfried – an odd fish with a name reminiscent of some kind of precious stone – positively changed color when she passed him in the corridor; he stopped short and was still standing as if rooted to the spot long after she had disappeared.

    — Thomas Mann – “Tristan”

  • September 18th, 2012 6:45pm

    It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all of the living and the dead.

    — James Joyce – “The Dead” Dubliners.

  • September 7th, 2012 7:37am

    Rushing was the very last thing his words seemed to be doing; indeed, for one whose profession and social status it was to be a writer, he was making miserably slow progress, and no one could have watched him without reaching the conclusion that a writer is a man to whom writing comes harder than to anyone else.

    —

    Tristan by Thomas Mann (via tsumetaihikari) 

    Just finished reading this in one of the lit classes I’m taking. Definitely my favorite of Mann’s stories.