R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 3

Reddish Egret @ Bolsa Chica (Video)

Yesterday: Another Morning with the Glorious (and almost always Entertaining) Reddish Egret @ Bolsa Chica. Fishing is an Art Form. Enjoy your weekend!💗

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#beauty

#readmorepoetry2025💗

Mann's Tonio Kroger

A wonderful poem by Theodor Storm came into his mind: “I long to sleep, to sleep, but you must dance.” What a torment, what a humiliating contradiction it was to have to dance when one’s heart was heavy with love . . .

Death in Venice

As he beheld the sweet youthful creature who had so entranced him he felt disgust at his own aging body, the sight of his gray hair and sharp features filled him with a sense of shame and hopelessness. He felt a compulsive need to refresh and restore himself physically; he paid frequent visits to the hotel barber. Cloaked in a hairdressing gown, leaning back in the chair as the chatterer’s hands tended him, he stared in dismay at his reflection in the looking glass. “Gray,” he remarked with a wry grimace. “A little,” the man replied. “And the reason? A slight neglect, a slight lack of interest in outward appearances, very understandable in persons of distinction, but not altogether to be commended, especially as one would expect those very persons to be free from prejudice about such matters as the natural and the artificial. If certain people who profess moral disapproval of cosmetics were to be logical enough to extend such rigorous principles to their teeth, the result would be rather disgusting.

Death in Venice: Tadzio

They answered, repeatedly shouting his name or a diminutive of his name, and Aschenbach listened for this with a certain curiosity, unable to pick up anything more precise than two melodious syllables that sounded something like “Adgio” or still oftener “Adgiu,” called out with a long u at the end. The sound pleased him, he found its euphony befitting to its object, repeated it quietly to himself and turned again with satisfaction to his letters and papers.

Death in Venice

What was he doing here? He had gone completely astray. That was where he had wanted to travel. He at once gave notice of departure from his present, mischosen stopping place. Ten days after his arrival on the island, in the early morning mist, a rapid motor-launch carried him and his luggage back over the water to the naval base, and here he landed only to re-embark immediately, crossing the gangway onto the damp deck of a ship that was waiting under steam to leave for Venice.

Mann's Death in Venice

For a significant intellectual product to make a broad and deep immediate appeal, there must be a hidden affinity, indeed a congruence, between the personal destiny of the author and the wider destiny of his generation.

Little Herr Friedemann

Then suddenly, shuddering all over, he started to his feet, uttering a sobbing noise, a moan of sorrow which was somehow at the same time a cry of relief, and slowly sank to the ground in front of her. He had put his hand on hers, which had lain beside him on the seat; he clutched it now and seized the other as well; and as this little, totally deformed creature knelt there before her, quivering convulsively and burying his face in her lap, he stammered out in a hardly human, strangled voice: “But you know! You know I . . . Let me . . . I can’t go on . . . Oh my God . . . my God . . .” She did not push him away, nor did she lower her head toward him. She sat erect, leaning back slightly, and her small close-set eyes, which seemed to mirror the liquid glint of the water, stared intently straight ahead, beyond him, into the distance. And then, with a sudden violent movement, with a short, proud, scornful laugh, she had snatched her hands from his burning fingers, seized him by the arm, flung him sideways right onto the ground, leapt to her feet and vanished into the avenue. He lay there with his face in the grass, stunned and desperate, with his body shuddering and twitching. He picked himself up, took two steps and collapsed again onto the grass. He was lying by the water’s edge. What was really his state of mind, his motive in what followed? Perhaps it was that same voluptuous hatred he had felt when she humbled him with her eyes; and now that he was lying here on the ground like a dog she had kicked, did this hatred perhaps degenerate into an insane fury which had to be translated into action, even if it was only action against himself—did it become an access of self-disgust, a craving to annihilate himself, to tear himself to pieces, to blot himself out . . .? He dragged himself on his stomach further down the slope, lifted the upper part of his body and let it drop into the water. He did not raise his head again; even his legs on the bank lay still. The splash had silenced the crickets for a moment. Now they began their chirping as before, the park rustled softly and down the long avenue came the muted sound of laughter.

Mann's Little Herr Friedemann

At a table immediately to the right of the door a small circle had formed around the student, who was discoursing volubly. He had asserted that more than one parallel to a given straight line could be drawn through one and the same point; Dr. Hagenström’s wife had exclaimed: “But that’s impossible!” and he was now proving his proposition so cogently that everyone was pretending to have understood it.

Bartleby

Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.

Bartleby

Meanwhile Bartleby sat in his hermitage, oblivious to everything but his own peculiar business there. Some days passed, the scrivener being employed upon another lengthy work. His late remarkable conduct led me to regard his ways narrowly. I observed that he never went to dinner; indeed, that he never went anywhere. As yet I had never, of my personal knowledge, known him to be outside of my office. He was a perpetual sentry in the corner. At about eleven o'clock though, in the morning, I noticed that Ginger Nut would advance toward the opening in Bartleby's screen, as if silently beckoned thither by a gesture invisible to me where I sat. The boy would then leave the office, jingling a few pence, and reappear with a handful of ginger-nuts, which he delivered in the hermitage, receiving two of the cakes for his trouble. He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian, then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called, because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now, what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably, he preferred it should have none.