from Dr Zhivago: the joy of writing

     After two or three stanzas and several images by which he was himself astonished, his work took possession of him and he experienced the approach of inspiration. At such moments the correlation of the forces controlling the artist is, as it were, stood on its head. The ascendancy is no longer with the artist or the state of mind he is trying to express, but with language, his instrument of expression. Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward, audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its outward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by the force of its own laws, rhyme and rhythm and countless other forms and formations, still more important and until now undiscovered, unconsidered and unnamed.

     At such moments Yury felt that the main part of his work was not being done by him but by something which was above him and controlling him: the thought and poetry of the world as it was at that moment and as it would be in the future. He was controlled by the next step it was to take in the order of its historical development; and he felt himself to be only the pretext and the pivot setting it in motion.

     This feeling relieved him for a time of self-reproach, of dissatisfaction with himself, of the sense of his nothingness....

Random images

This is going to be a really random piece full of quotations...

It's funny how certain images have a tendency to get permanently etched in your mind. I was teaching Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column this morning when it struck me that one of the things that define this book for me happens to be one horrifying image-that of a woman dying of tetanus.

This woman gives birth to a still-born child and gets infected with tetanus.
Everyone thinks she is possessed by the devil. They try to drive away the
devil by opening the Quran...
I could hardly see. Jumman stood by the door. Some women grouped round the bed lifted the mother of Nandi toward me, supporting her head and shoulders. I could see the skull of a small animal near the head of the bed. And then I looked at her face, her mouth.It was twisting fiendishly. My paralysed lips scarcely moved. I held the open Quran near her face, and my fingers fumbled as I drew them rapidly through the thin pages.

...The woman's face and body twisted. The women around her moaned.
I ran into the sunshine towards my room.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, an image that haunts me to this day is that of a baby being eaten up by ants.

And then he saw the child. It was a dry bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden.

Then there are the rats in Orwell's 1984...

The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now.One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.

All random images tied together by the sense of horror, tied together by the hair standing on the back of my neck...