The following are this months favorite things I’ve read: quotes, sentences, passages, footnoted or referenced in my journey with Les Mis.
“It is the same with poverty as everything else. It can become bearable. It eventually arranges itself and settles down.”
“Monsieur Mabeuf’s political opinion was his passionate love of plants, ans especially of books.(…….) -he was a book-specialist.”
When Hugo inserts his own poems in the book. I particularly found this one timely.
FABLE OR HISTORY
Possessed of royal appetite, and feeling rather thin,
A monkey one day dressed himself in a tiger’s skin
The tiger had been nasty; the monkey was atrocious,
Wearing on his back the right to be ferocious.
He set himself to gnashing teeth and let loose with this cry:
Conqueror of the jungle, the night’s dark king am I!
As a bandit of the forest, in the bushes he lurked,
And snatched away and murdered and other horrors worked.
Laid waste the forest, slit the throats of those passing through,
And with the skin that covered him did all it used to do.
He lived within a cave, knee-deep in butchery,
And all who saw the skin believed the tiger was he.
He would cry out, would bring forth a truly terrible roar:
Behold within my cave the bones of victims before.
Before me all draw back and shudder, everyone doth flee,
All tremble – I am tiger! Look! and worship me!
The animals were all awe-struck and fled with great alarm,
A lion-tamer came and grabbed him with his arm,
And ripped off the tiger’s skin like a flimsy piece of tissue,
Laid bare this ‘conqueror’ and said, ‘You’re just a monkey, you!’
“Marius was dazzled by those eyes full of light and unfathomable depths. He felt his brain was on fire. She had come to him. How marvelous. And then the way she looked at him? She seemed to him more beautiful than he had ever yet seen her. Of a beauty that was wholly feminine and angelic, a perfect beauty that would have made Petrarch sing and brought Dante to his knees.”
“And that was the it. Marius loved a woman. His destiny was entering the unknown.”
“Appetite comes with eating but thirst goes away by drinking.”
“The embryonic work of the future is one of the visions of philosophy.”
“In it’s hideous busyness it not only undermines the present social order, it undermines philosophy, it undermines science, it undermines law, human thought, civilization, revolution, progress. It is called quite simply theft, prostitution, murder, assassination. It is darkness and it wants chaos. Its value is shaped by ignorance.”
“What is needed to make these noxious spirits disappear?
LIGHT.
Floods of light.
No bat withstands the dawn.
Illuminate society’s underside.”
“A glimpse of glimmer of sun, and the bear goes back to it’s den.”
“The virtue of mercy and piety is the one that most closely binds society.”
In any case there is a point where the poor and the wicked become mixed up and lumped together in the one fateful word:
Les Miserables
-the wretched.
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…”
reference to Ecclesiastes 1:2
“Everything is meaningless,” says the Teacher, “completely meaningless!”
That sums up the month for me. I am still loving the read and look forward to reading more.
On to August.
