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the childhood pleasure of being the first to leave footprints

"He was thinking about the way the dropped curtain closed off the fourth wall and turned the stage into a room, albeit a room with cavernous space instead of a ceiling, fathoms of catwalks and lights between which a soul might slip undetected."

Poesy.

Welp, now I have to read Czeslaw Milosz's The Separate Notebooks.

Kvothe about Martin and the tinker. I can't.

'Fooling folk was as simple as singing. Tricking folk and telling lies, it was like breathing.
But this? Convincing someone of the truth that they were too twisted to see? How could you even begin?
It was baffling. These creatures. They were fraught and frayed in their desire. A snake would never poison itself, but these folk made an art of it. They wrapped themselves in fears and wept at being blind.'

"'You've got grass stains on your pants. Your mam is going to give you a hiding.'
'No, she won't,' Bast said smugly, 'Because I'm all grown, and I can do whatever I want with my pants. I could light them on fire and I wouldn't get in any trouble at all.'
The little girl stared at him with smoldering envy."

Love it.

'It's getting cold at night. Winter's coming.'
The innkeeper smiled. 'I'm sure Martin will be flattered.'

THIS STORY IS IN GEORGE R.R. MARTIN'S ROGUES AND I DO NOT BELIEVE IN LITERARY COINCIDENCE (except when I do, but that's not now).

'It wasn't like that now. Now his desires grew complicated. They constantly conflicted with each other. He felt endlessly turned against himself.'

When Kierkegaard's aesthete runs headlong into Fear and Trembling. Precious, petulant, absurd, awkward.

'This never used to happen. He had never been in conflict with his own desire before he came here. He hated it. It was so simply singular before. Want and have. See and take. Run and chase. Thirst and slake. And if he were thwarted in the pursuit of his desire, what of it? That was simply the way of things. The desire itself was still his, it was still pure.'

cont.

'To break a promise fairly made and lie outright was retrograde to his desire. Even worse to do it in this place. Far easier to tell the truth, then make sure something happened to the boy...
But honestly, he liked the boy. he was funny and grim and hungry and more alive than any three other people in the town all put together. He was bright as broken glass and sharp enough to cut himself.'

cont.

"'Lord and lady. Ongoing? Was your mother scared by an azzie when she was pregnant? Where do you get that kind of talk?'
'I stay awake in church.' Kostrel shrugged."

Heeh!

'Bullshittery.'

I love you, Patrick Rothfuss. And I love Kostrel too.

'He looked like a naughty child who had managed to steal the moon and eat it. His smile was like the last sliver of remaining moon, sharp and white and dangerous.'

More fantasy needs to be written this way, dammit. Playful hints at magic where it lives.

'The back door's hinges creaked sometimes, depending on their mood, but that was easy to get around.'

The sweet little familiar personification is so like Auri. I can't. Even.

'They seemed, going up the drive, like creatures without shells, dreading any impact: lovers returning to the world. When Betty, hurrying away from the house, said 'Good-evening', they flinched; for all day long they had heard only one another's voices.'

The first breaths of a poem worth reading.

'Love is a disturbing element, as Isabella had said--disruptive, far-reaching. The world cannot assimilate it, or eject it. Its beauty can evoke evil: its radiance corrupts.'

I don't believe I agree with this statement at all, but I like the way she put it.
Love is relatively well-assimilated into popular culture. It's one of the few states I witness people striving toward/admiring/praising on a daily basis.

'Apart from feeling the impotence of her own personality, she was forced to suspect that, unlike herself, who had no mystery, no secrets (save her little flutters on horses), behind the facade of other people lay a labyrinth of mystery, a vast terrain of secrecy, which resulted in unaccountable behavior.'

Achingly adolescent, heartrending in context.

'In his world, the elders were disgusted with the young--tactlessly and illogically disgusted that they should manage to live in the sad conditions bequeathed to them. No apologies were made for having handed on such a world, and Isabella, for instance, gaily blamed her son for taking what he found....He thought that he inherited all her generation's sighs, as well as the fruits of their foolishness.'

Familiar.

In little ways, V.'s interactions with Rita and Emily evoke Chekhov's Three Sisters.

'You meant everything to me. You were always at the back of my thoughts.'
'The back?' he smiled.
'Because I was sure of you. There was no need for you to be in the foreground, as people are who can't be relied on. The letters we mean to keep for ever we put at the back of the drawer.'"

Evoke's Irina's locked-piano-heart, yes?

'Erotic visions he had often had, but these, and Len's and Fred's and Norman's stories, seemed now to have nothing to do with the truth; for, in all the visions and the stories, tenderness had been missing, and this, as he now found, was a foreign ingredient, negativing other ingredients, such as callous triumph, cruelty, lechery, rude laughter; transforming lust to love, sensuality to sensuousness.'

Precious.

'In first love--and to some people for ever after, too--the long-anticipated is strangest of all; the inevitable cannot be believed; the familiar daydream becomes the most unfamiliar reality.'

I envy it. I want pleasant emotion to take me by surprise.

Also, Betty and Laurence's arc is my favorite. Theirs is the fairy tale I want to read. Their dragons are so much more interesting.

'You have been round the world for nothing if, when you return, you have still only yourself to measure [a person] against.'

I like it.

'Mrs Tumulty was no feminist. She did not use her vote, believing (although she herself could never have been sexually attractive to men) that public affairs are more effectively and picturesquely influenced behind the scenes; either by what she called 'political hostesses' or by intellectual courtesans. Hardy as she always had been, she insisted on deference to the frailty of her sex.'

Absurd, sad, hilarious.

On an interruption:

'Her husband seemed slowly to draw his attention up from his book as if it were a bucket in a well. He turned a look on her, at first blank, but soon considering. He pondered her statement gravely, but half his gravity was still preoccupation with his book.'

Familiar, dizzying, half-irritating when accompanied by the expectation that all was heard (as if your senses awaited distraction).

"the secret messages of entwined fingers"

scattered little lovelinesses

'In dreams, he had often before discovered the truth, or invented a condition which later became the truth. In dreams, he had fallen in love, and, waking, found his relationship with someone unexpectedly, perhaps irremediably, changed. He would see them afterwards in a different light, unable to believe that they did not hold the dream in common.'

And yet our omniscient narrator repeatedly insists he is "sensible."

'He began to resemble the clock calmly and methodically.'

That's what I read, and it was poetry for a moment. Then:

'He began to reassemble the clock calmly and methodically.'

I prefer the first.

Past and future to him were realities; the present dull, meaningless, only significant if, as now...he could say to himself: 'Later on, I shall remember.' To link his favorite tenses in such a phrase was to him the exhalation of romance, and the fact that such phrases had preceded all his disappointments, heralded all the counterfeit and treachery he had worked or suffered, could not detract from its magic.

[He] felt more than ever the sweet disappointments only a romantic knows, whose very desires invite frustration; who loves twilight rather than midday, the echo more than the voice, the moon more than the sun, and women better than men; adoring all scarcely-revealed things; insinuations, whispers, eyes veiled, landscapes veiled; the imperfectly remembered and the half-anticipated.

'Laurence listened to the story of the past and hoped that the conversation would stay there rather than turn to the future, the thought of which filled him with dismay and a sense of inferiority.'

Familiar, familial, sad.