Monday, February 10, 2014

Those moments when being in three literature classes really means reading from different authors, in different cultures, at different time periods, in different genres with different stylistic elements, but about the same thing . . .

" . . . Once again/Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,/That on a wild secluded scene impress/Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect/The landscape with the quiet of the sky./The day is come when I again repose/Here, under this dark sycamore, and view/These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,/Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,/Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves/'Mid groves and copses . . . These beauteous forms,Through a long absence, have not been to me/As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:/But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din/Of towns and cities, I have owed to them/In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,/Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;/And passing even into my purer mind,/With tranquil restoration:--feelings too/Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,/As have no slight or trivial influence/On that best portion of a good man's life,/His little, nameless, unremembered, acts/Of kindness and of love . . .."
~William Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" lines 4-14, 22-35

"Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures that are there and all the faintest motions in the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all of the colors of dawn and dusk."
~N. Scott Momaday of the Kiowa tribe, in "The Man Made of Words"

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