Tobin Moffatt > Recent Status Updates

'The stars would become increasingly important for him---literally so when he took up astrology---but however high he rose, he never succeeded in completely shaking off his human longing for love. The compensations afforded him by his poetry, his ideal contemplations, and his spirited discoveries could not make him forget his solitude.'

‘. . . His medically couched observations and diagnosis of Paul Verlaine in “Degeneration” are typical. After spending ten pages analyzing the signs of degeneration in the Frenchman’s poetry . . . Nordau concludes that “this most famous of the Symbolists” is “a repulsive degenerate subject with asymmetric skull and Mongolian face,” . . .”

7 hours of escape to Pessoan Lisbon

'I had supposed Elstir to be a modest man, but I realised my mistake on seeing his face cloud with melancholy when, in a little speech of thanks, I uttered the word "fame." Men who believe that their works will last -as was the case with Elstir- form the habit of placing them in a period when they themselves will have crumbled to dust.'

'. . . if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. The names which designate things correspond invariably to an intellectual motion, alien to our true impressions, and compelling us to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping with that notion.'

'. . . as happens with every big thing which we have begun by fearing, because we know it to be incompatible with smaller things which we prize and which it does not so much deprive us of as detach us from. Before we experience it, our whole preoccupation is to know to what extent we can reconcile it with certain pleasures which cease to be pleasures as soon as we have experienced it.'

'I'm nothing.
I'll always be nothing,
I can't want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.'

'Jack Wilde, who has "a propensity to mad acts" and who's last name is surely inspired by the Irish writer who died in disgrace in 1900, announces to a friend that he is getting married on Friday the 13th of July, 1906 . . . the marriage duly takes place, but ends in a scene of horror, with thirteen wedding guests being hanged according to an elaborate plan executed by the unhappy groom, who also hangs himself.'

'I know not death and think it no release----
The bad indeed is better than the unknown.'

So many *English* language reading recommendations from Lisbon's great Anglophile. Must do as Fernando did and get hold of Sartor Resartus and The Pickwick Papers asap.

‘“Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.”’

‘It was an evil hour when you learned how to bray, Sancho!’

'Hege looked at him hesitantly. She was blind, couldn't see. Then her happiness returned again, and she wanted to be off.
"Do you remember what things were like before?" he began, but he couldn't go on, had to leave without another word. Too many memories came back to him.'

‘But the dark eye.
Closed now.
And a big heavy stone over it.
Neither lid nor stone can hide an eye like that - once it has looked at you.’

‘He used ordinary human speech. It felt coarse and commonplace. He would have liked to start using bird language for good - to have gone home to Hege and never spoken in any other way. Then she might have begun to understand some of the things that were now hidden from her.
But he didn’t dare, he had a fair idea what would happen. Most likely they’d lock me up. . . . .’

‘Off he went the next day full of excitement, and he wasn’t disappointed. Not far away from his own writing the beak had pricked out a new message.
Mattis had expected this, but it had such an effect on him that he had to sit down on a stone.
Something really had been started between them.
And what did the bird say, its wonderful language? . .
Prick, prick, prick. Eternal friendship, that was what it meant.’

‘I don’t understand, says Ebbe. Why can’t you make characters like Dickens did, for example. You take yours from real life.’

'First he was a hussar, then he was a blacksmith, then he drank beer, then he drank soda pop.'

'I desire with all my heart to make contact with a world that seems to consist entirety of sick old men who might keel over at any moment, before I myself have grown old enough to be taken seriously.'

I think this will end up being a personal favourite. Funny.

‘ “Get out of my sight, you slack-twisted, slim-looking maphrotight fool,” ‘