Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/28/10

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Poem of the Day: Thomas Hardy

The Convergence of the Twain
LINES ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC

          1
          In a solitude of the sea
          Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

          2
          Steel chambers, late the pyres
          Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

          3
          Over the mirrors meant
          To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls -- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

          4
          Jewels in joy designed
          To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

          5
          Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"

6
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

7
Prepared a sinister mate
For her -- so gaily great --
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

8
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

9
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

   10
   Or sign that they were bent
   By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

   11
   Till the Spinner of the Years
   Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

--Thomas Hardy

Yes, it's hokum, this personification of the Titanic as human pride and the Iceberg as nature's might. But is it any hokier than James Cameron's version?