I have spent November catching up on my reading and blogging, journaling and flagging my Les Miserable experience. I am nearing the end! Alas I am going to miss this book and these characters and this writing. It is quite possibly the best thing I will ever read in my life.
Favorites from this months section……
She began to hope with all her might without knowing why.
Youth is the smile of the future in the face of the unknown, which is its own self. It is as though it breathes hope.
The possibility of attainment should turn into increased respect.
Cosette leaned over as if instinctively, and almost without daring to admit to herself that she was thinking at the same time fo Marius, began to observe these birds, this family, this male and this female, this mother and her young, with the profound discomfiture that a nest imparts to a virgin.
When old women empty their chamber-pots on our heads,
we’re doomed.
They shall find a child wrapped in swaddling clothes …the Luke 2 story is referenced.
White and naked, the statues under the trees were robed in shadow rent with light. These goddesses were slothed all in tatters of sunshine. Sunbeams hung from them on everyside.
The witticism lies in the fact that swans cygnes and signals signes are homophones in French.
What’s is it?
“To be the one who blows that man’s brains out.”
Javert himself did not notice that he was no longer addressing Jean Valjean with disrespectful familiarity.
“Maybe God is dead,” Gerard de Nerval said one day to the writer of these lines, confusing progress with God, and mistaking the interruption of movement for the death of the Essence.
What then is progress? We have just said what it is. The enduring life of peoples.
Victory, when in accord with progress, deserves the approbation of the masses, but a heroic defeat deserves their compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime.
Revolutionaries are accused of sowing terror. Every barricade seems an outrage. Their theories are condemned, their purpose is suspected, their ulterior motives are feared, theri moral conscience is discredited. They are accused of erecting, constructing and assembling against the prevailing social order a whole heap of hardships, woes, iniquities, grievances, causes for despair, and of tearing up from the lower depths swathes of darkness in order to throw up battlements and fight from behind them. People shout, “You’re tearing up the paving-stones of hell!” They might well reply, “That’s because our barricade is made of good intentions.”
*An illusion to The Bear and the Gardener about a bear who wanting to spare his new friend from the annoyance of a fly on the end of his nose drops a paving-stone on it.
Races fossilized by dogma or corrupted by lucre are unfit to guide civilization.
Peoples, like stars, have the right to go into eclipse. And everything is fine, as long as the light returns and the eclipse does not degenerate into permanent darkness. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of light is indistinguishable from the enduring quality of the self.
Then the grim love of life stirred in some.
Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as he had kissed the old man’s hand the day before. These were the only two kisses he had bestowed in his life.
It was monstrous heroism. Marius was indeed a prisoner. A prisoner of Jean Valjean.
Profound peace, absolute silence, night.
The sensation he had experienced when escaping from the street into the convent came back to him. Only, today it was not Cosette he was carrying, it was Marius.
The Bowels of Leviathan……. THE SEWERS here we go……..
To the City and to the World.
We like this sincerity in foulness, it is restful to the soul. When you have spent your time on earth enduring the spectacle of the airs and graces assumed by reasons of state, solemn oaths, political wisdom, human justice, professional integrity, the rigours of high office, the robes of incorruptibility, it is a relief to go into the sewer and see the filth that belongs there.
So it was at the beginning of this century the old society attended to its hidden underside and put its sewers to rights. At least that was on thing cleaned up.
..a tribute the sewer pays to civilization….
Apart from the economic progress we mentioned at the beginning theres are serious problems of public hygiene relating to this enormous issue of Paris’s sewer.
It might be said that for ten centuries the sewer has been Paris’s disease.
The Mire, Yet The Soul.
Only the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know whether what he was carrying down that hold was dead or alive.
With Sand as With Women, There is Fineness That is Treacherous
He stood up, shivering, chilled, stinking, bowed beneath this dying man he was carrying, dripping all over with filth, his soul filled with a strange brightness.
He was thinking of Cosette.
