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...with my usual perfect sense of ill-timing, when I have 10+ books to read for various future projects, I am instead reading The Left Hand of Darkness. I'm close to the middle now, and it's already recognisably a love-story, of the most perfect kind.
one central character thinks of the other (they are not yet close to being anything like friends, they are in a common political soup together):
"The Envoy spoke well, with moving candor and urgency. There is an innocence in him that I have found merely foreign and foolish; yet in another moment that seeming innocence reveals a discipline of knowledge and a largeness of purpose that awes me. Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably various experience of life. But he himself is young: impatient, inexperienced. He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man."
IDK how I didn't see or remember or wasn't moved by this on my first reading of it, some years ago? maybe that was before I discovered fanfic, and with it the possibility of minds meeting?
...when I say 'love-story', I am of course being coy: what I mean is a story of a profound meeting between two minds. well, for all intents and purposes, that IS a love story, right?
'The jack is in the middle of an understanding.' (c)
'Two intelligent, amoral men attempt to communicate. With, you know, each other.' (c)
I would wonder if it's only women who are capable of putting this kind of dramatic tension into the *heart* of a text (as opposed to having such a story, however beautiful, in the perifery, and making the heart of it a single character or a larger story or an ethical issue etc.) and yet I *have* read Dostoyevsky through all my teenage years and sometimes he does this too.
one central character thinks of the other (they are not yet close to being anything like friends, they are in a common political soup together):
"The Envoy spoke well, with moving candor and urgency. There is an innocence in him that I have found merely foreign and foolish; yet in another moment that seeming innocence reveals a discipline of knowledge and a largeness of purpose that awes me. Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably various experience of life. But he himself is young: impatient, inexperienced. He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man."
IDK how I didn't see or remember or wasn't moved by this on my first reading of it, some years ago? maybe that was before I discovered fanfic, and with it the possibility of minds meeting?
...when I say 'love-story', I am of course being coy: what I mean is a story of a profound meeting between two minds. well, for all intents and purposes, that IS a love story, right?
'The jack is in the middle of an understanding.' (c)
'Two intelligent, amoral men attempt to communicate. With, you know, each other.' (c)
I would wonder if it's only women who are capable of putting this kind of dramatic tension into the *heart* of a text (as opposed to having such a story, however beautiful, in the perifery, and making the heart of it a single character or a larger story or an ethical issue etc.) and yet I *have* read Dostoyevsky through all my teenage years and sometimes he does this too.
