Saturday 6 September 2008

Literary Pursuits


Haven't created any new music to post in quite a while, so I thought I might include a "clipping" from a story I've been working on. (Click on "Untitled," above.)  Ideally, this will eventually spin itself out into a novel length work, but I have no idea how long that might take! I've been very inspired lately by a late-Victorian author I've "discovered" named Mary Cholmondeley. She's the first writer that I've found who holds my attention as thoroughly as Thomas Hardy, though her style is totally unique. Below is one of my favourite quotes from her novel, Diana Tempest:

"But still more bewildering is the way in which we live years and years with ourselves in an entire ignorance of the powers that lie dormant beneath the surface of character. The day comes when vital forces of which we know nothing arise within us, and break like glass the even tenor of our lives. The quiet hours, the regulated thoughts, the peaceful aspiration after things but little set above us, where are they? The angel with the sword drives us out of our Eden to shiver in the wilderness of an entirely changed existence, unrecognisable by ourselves, though perhaps lived in the same external groove, the same divisions of time, among the same faces as before."