heliopausa (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
heliopausa) wrote2013-07-07 01:33 pm
heliopausa) wrote2013-07-07 01:33 pm
Ulysses, NFE...
"It may be that the gulfs will wash us down
It may be we shall reach the happy isles..."
...were lines from Tennyson's Ulysses that were running in my head as I looked at the chaotic pile of words which may or may not be hammered into shape as an NFE fic.
And because I am a procrastinator and not at all disciplined in writing, I drifted away to look at the poem, to see if I remembered it right, and found myself on a website which said that Tennyson was riffing off Dante's view of Ulysses when he wrote that, and which quoted a translation of Dante, Ulysses speaking:
"'O brothers,' I said, 'who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the West deny not to this the brief vigil of your senses that remain, experience of the unpeopled world beyond the sun. Consider your origin, ye were not formed to live like Brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.... Night already saw the other pole with all its stars and ours so low that it rose not from the ocean floor'"
Ah-ha!
:) What fun! Because, from the thirteenth chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader :
"But the third, who was a very masterful man, leaped up and said, `No, by heaven. We are men and Telmarines, not brutes. What should we do but seek adventure after adventure? We have not long to live in any event. Let us spend what is left in seeking the unpeopled world behind the sunrise.' "
I love this! :) (I'm sorry, runesnspoons, (who has gently reproved me before for the doubling-up italics and underlinings) Just one or the other is not enough right now, to convey how cheerful this makes me feel.)
That is, I really, really like C. S.Lewis giving to the imagined children reading his books tiny glimpses of the great literature which waits for them out there, and I like as well the chain of quotings and requotings of stories through centuries. I can see (but am too lazy to draw!) a huge family-tree of the Ulysses story, thousands of years and dozens of languages long. Which all makes me feel very cheerful.
It may be we shall reach the happy isles..."
...were lines from Tennyson's Ulysses that were running in my head as I looked at the chaotic pile of words which may or may not be hammered into shape as an NFE fic.
And because I am a procrastinator and not at all disciplined in writing, I drifted away to look at the poem, to see if I remembered it right, and found myself on a website which said that Tennyson was riffing off Dante's view of Ulysses when he wrote that, and which quoted a translation of Dante, Ulysses speaking:
"'O brothers,' I said, 'who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the West deny not to this the brief vigil of your senses that remain, experience of the unpeopled world beyond the sun. Consider your origin, ye were not formed to live like Brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.... Night already saw the other pole with all its stars and ours so low that it rose not from the ocean floor'"
Ah-ha!
:) What fun! Because, from the thirteenth chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader :
"But the third, who was a very masterful man, leaped up and said, `No, by heaven. We are men and Telmarines, not brutes. What should we do but seek adventure after adventure? We have not long to live in any event. Let us spend what is left in seeking the unpeopled world behind the sunrise.' "
I love this! :) (I'm sorry, runesnspoons, (who has gently reproved me before for the doubling-up italics and underlinings) Just one or the other is not enough right now, to convey how cheerful this makes me feel.)
That is, I really, really like C. S.Lewis giving to the imagined children reading his books tiny glimpses of the great literature which waits for them out there, and I like as well the chain of quotings and requotings of stories through centuries. I can see (but am too lazy to draw!) a huge family-tree of the Ulysses story, thousands of years and dozens of languages long. Which all makes me feel very cheerful.