"Thought is a real thing. It is a live thing. It creates; it destroys; it begets; it projects its living offspring. Like certain forms of physical pain thoughts can take organic shapes. They can live and grow and generate, independently of the person in whose being they originated."
"He was secretly proud that this child of his sturdy Quantock loins had made the son of the great Marquis of P. a shamefaced wittol."
Well, I never knew there was a specific word for that! ?
When I first tried this book 10 years ago, I read 299 of its 1,120 pages. I've just exceeded that with 313 pages, leaving another 806 to complete, being a further 72% of the total, or 360,000 more of its approximately 500,000 words.
None of these statistics convey how rich a reading experience it is. I've read nothing else like it, though the cover blurb comparison with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy feels entirely just, even if Powys is his own writer.
"There are levels of feminine emotion in the state of love entirely and forever unknown to men."
“There are only two mortal sins in the world; one of these is to be cruel and the other is to possess, and they are both destructive of happiness.”
I love it when different reading overlaps and mutually informs. Powys's characters inhabit a living environment in which the English trees, rocks, rivers and even the mud forming the river bed are all inhabited by a living animus with thoughts, feelings and influences. I've just finished a chapter titled The River in which the being of MC John Crow temporarily merges with a riverside willow tree shoot.
The latest edition of #NewInternationalist 👇
“Don't let me ever compete with anyone! If I'm a worm and no man, let me enjoy my life as a worm. Let me stop showing off to anyone... Let me live my life free from the opinions, good or bad, of all other people!”
"At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe."
The first sentence of a 1120 page...
Having spent a good chunk of the weekend watching Glastonbury on TV, I was reminded that 10 years ago I paused reading this 1120 page monster at 299. As we're going away for a few days to the bookshop desert that is Anglesey, I thought I'd take this as back up against the inevitable rain-ins. I'll have to start from the beginning, though.
Bookmark is from Wookey Hole, a tourist attraction with a central plot role.
Glastonbury Romance (Revised) | 
