Jillyn'Toast
December 28th 2006, 09:27 PM
I am absorbed with Lewis Carroll.
I've always loved Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I also am a intrigued with The Hunting of the Snark. But, I recently began reading Sylvie and Bruno. This book had a Preface. I was very impressed with some things he had to say:
Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature-at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes-is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. I do not know if "Alice in Wonderland" was an original story-I was, at least, no conscious immitator in writing it-but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen storybooks have timidly explored-believing myself to be "the first that ever burst into that silent sea"-is now a beaten highroad: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.
He wanted to write original stories, and he did. But, then after he wrote only two stories in one style, he abandon it and began writing a new style. I admire that so much. Alice used nonsense to teach children logic. There's something in that that is very beautiful to me. He uses logic, then, in Sylvie and Bruno to begin a fairy tale. He always ends his stories with a moral. They are never nonsense for the sake of nonsense. :smile:
I've always loved Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I also am a intrigued with The Hunting of the Snark. But, I recently began reading Sylvie and Bruno. This book had a Preface. I was very impressed with some things he had to say:
Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature-at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes-is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. I do not know if "Alice in Wonderland" was an original story-I was, at least, no conscious immitator in writing it-but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen storybooks have timidly explored-believing myself to be "the first that ever burst into that silent sea"-is now a beaten highroad: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.
He wanted to write original stories, and he did. But, then after he wrote only two stories in one style, he abandon it and began writing a new style. I admire that so much. Alice used nonsense to teach children logic. There's something in that that is very beautiful to me. He uses logic, then, in Sylvie and Bruno to begin a fairy tale. He always ends his stories with a moral. They are never nonsense for the sake of nonsense. :smile: