Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.
We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes-ah, so like our mother's!- averted from us in cold alienation; and our last darling child startles us with the air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long years ago.
The father to whom we owe our best heritage-the mechanical instinct, the keen sensibility to harmony, the unconscious skill of the modelling hand-galls us and puts us to shame by his daily errors; the long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass as our own wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious humours and irrational persistence.
...George Eliot
satya - Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:04:21 PM
recumbent, accumbent, decumbent
lying or inclined position
satya - Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:06:48 PM
unrecumbent
and here and there a disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified "in unrecumbent sadness"
satya - Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:09:39 PM
About Christmas she wrote..
Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the limbs of infancy; it lay with the neatliest finished border on every sloping roof, making the dark-red gables stand out with a new depth of color; it weighed heavily on the laurels and fir-trees, till it fell from them with a shuddering sound;
it clothed the rough turnip-field with whiteness, and made the sheep look like dark blotches; the gates were all blocked up with the sloping drifts, and here and there a disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified "in unrecumbent sadness";
there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow. But old Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the outdoor world, for he meant to light up home with new brightness, to deepen all the richness of indoor color, and give a keener edge of delight to the warm fragrance of food; he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred, and make the sunshine of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden day-star.
His kindness fell but hardly on the homeless,--fell but hardly on the homes where the hearth was not very warm, and where the food had little fragrance; where the human faces had had no sunshine in them, but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want.
But the fine old season meant well; and if he has not learned the secret how to bless men impartially, it is because his father Time, with ever-unrelenting unrelenting purpose, still hides that secret in his own mighty, slow-beating heart.
satya - Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:10:09 PM
unresting sorrow
unresting sorrow
satya - Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:10:59 PM
unresting sorrow
unresting sorrow
satya - Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:11:07 PM
unexpectant want
unexpectant want
satya - Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:11:41 PM
bless ... impartially
bless ... impartially
satya - Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:13:47 PM
leaden means gray, dull, overcast, weary
...like those made from lead
satya - Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:14:25 PM
current chapter: christmas holidays
satya - Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:19:40 PM
On the embarking winter...
How glad Tom was to see the last yellow leaves fluttering before the cold wind! The dark afternoons and the first December snow seemed to him far livelier than the August sunshine; and that he might make himself the surer about the flight of the days that were carrying him homeward, he stuck twenty-one sticks deep in a corner of the garden, when he was three weeks from the holidays, and pulled one up every day with a great wrench, throwing it to a distance with a vigor of will which would have carried it to limbo, if it had been in the nature of sticks to travel so far.
satya - Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:26:17 PM
On childhood...
...where the outerworld seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs;