Saturday, September 9, 2017

The Power of Words

The two following excerpts, namely two long sentences, periodic and melodic. The first stark terrestrial, the second abstract and emotional--the two ways of seeing and expressing, simplicity and abstraction. The first one has been with me since long, but the second one has been just inculcated as I am nearing the end of the book, Les Misérables, a soothing potion of mine so far for my being where, the second alien home of a rambling refugee. Why? Nothing to complain now. I am no longer of this pattern, this fray. Well, play with the music that words are for, the euphony, the vignette. 


*
"My glimpse had been so hurried, so shot through with the confusion of the moment--coming at the end of a swift sequence of little alarms and recognitions--that I wasn't sure whether my imagination, as instantaneously as in a dream, hadn't suggested certain of the details I thought I had seen, to supply me with a picture of the man I had more or less created in my head already." VS Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival 
*
"He admitted,--it is thus, by a series of successive admissions of ourselves in regard to ourselves, that life amends us, little by little,--he admitted the chimerical and visionary side of his nature, a sort of internal cloud peculiar to many organizations, and which, in paroxysms of passion and sorrow, dilates as the temperature of the soul changes, and invades the entire man, to such a degree as to render him nothing more than a conscience bathed in a mist." Victor Hugo, Les Misérables 

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