As counterpart to the very successful poetry thread, this one invites well-read Members to share a page of prose which has in some way struck them.

It would be pleasantest we think were every post whatever else it might say to present one page, or a briefer passage, of text from a book.

Members with misgivings may care to observe that such procedure does indeed constitute no more than fair dealing for the purposes of presumably predominantly positive review.

We are all human and so "cliff hangers" full of prevenient and subsequent mystery will be welcome will not they?

Here is one off with which we start:

I don't think this will be a winner, Syd, because of the length of time to read through a whole page of prose.

But for what it is worth, here is a devastating condemnation of European colonialism by that master of the magisterial put down, and C18 Tory, Samuel Johnson.  He imagines a Native American chief addressing his people on seeing French or British troops marching through Quebec.  He describes the Europeans:

Some there are who boast of their humanity, and content themselves to seize our chases and our fisheries, who drive us from every tract of ground where fertility and pleasantness invite then to settle, and make no war upon us except when we intrude upon our own lands.

Others pretend to have purchased a right of residence and tyranny; but surely the insolence of such bargains is more offensive than the avowed and open dominion of force… We hoped to be secured by their favour from some other evil, or to learn the arts of Europe, by which we might be able to secure ourselves.  Their power they have never exerted in our defence, and their art they have studiously concealed from us.  Their treaties are only to deceive and their traffic only to defraud us.

They have a written law among them, of which they boast as derived from him who made the earth and sea, and by which they profess to believe man will be made happy when life shall forsake him.  Why is not this law communicated to us?  It is concealed because it is violated.  For how can they preach it to an Indian nation, when I am told that one of its first precepts forbids them to do to others what they would not that others should do to them?

The Idler 81 3 November 1759

I'd be glad to hear Ian Pace's comments.

I returned home. I had just spent the New Year's Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year. Presents I had indeed received, but not that present which alone could bring me pleasure, namely a line from Gilberte. I was nevertheless still young, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.

That was a really interesting page Dr Grew. I assume its selection arose in order to convey the literary tyranny of a) an overt overuse of the first- and third-person singular, b) an over-reliance upon a forest of unnecessary punctuation (especially an oppressive and barbaric superfluity of commas), and c) the poverty of commencing new paragraphs with adverbs or conjunctions.

Baz

A brief Brief by a master of brevity.


"I believe I hear that same clock striking."

Please enjoy the final page of James Joyce's The Dead:

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

'Here, caddie.' He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.

'Listen at you, now.' Luster said. 'Ain't you something, thirty-three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Ain't you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight?'

They were hitting little, across the pasture. I went back along the fence to where the flag was. It flapped on the bright grass and trees.

'Come on.' Luster said. 'We done looked there. They ain't no more coming right now. Let's go down to the branch and find that quarter before them niggers finds it.'

It was red, flapping on the pasture. Then there was a bird slanting and tilting on it. Luster threw. The flag flapped on the bright grass and the trees. I held to the fence.

DB, see reply 11, above. Aubrey it is.