Wouter > Recent Status Updates

"[...] the goal of creative work is ever approachable yet unattainable. "

"The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible. Answers are no part of it; rather it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self-quarrels, his own predicament."

"Thus the great ones [...] have taught me -- to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly."

"[...] the world's otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness--the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books--can re-dignify the worst stung heart."

"[...] I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple--or a green field --a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing--an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness--wonderful as that part of it is." (p. 12)

"[...] I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple--or a green field --a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing--an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness--wonderful as that part of it is." (p. 12)

"Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion."

Just finished "Fog on the Barrow-Downs" which closes the part I always find a drag. I know Tolkien was still in this idea of writing a Hobbit 2 but the wandering of the Hobbits through the forest and the downs reflects Tolkien's search for direction.

"The Old Forest", "Tom Bombadil" and "The Fog" read like a separate tale, not being rooted in the legends of The Lord of the Rings (except for the treasure in "Downs")

I picked this novel up in a class room the other day and enjoyed re-reading the first pages. So now I have this crazy idea to read the novel in the few moments of free time at school. A very slow read it is.