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comment by ecib
ecib  ·  3733 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: In Praise of (Offline) Slow Reading - NYTimes.com

Hey :)

Which 'Arnold' is in on the upper left of your bookshelf, out of curiosity. Is that the poet Mathew Arnold, or someone else?





lil  ·  3733 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Poet Matthew Arnold... interesting guy.

   Ah, love, let us be true
   To one another! for the world, which seems
   To lie before us like a land of dreams,
   So various, so beautiful, so new,
   Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
   Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
   And we are here as on a darkling plain
   Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
   Where ignorant armies clash by night
from Dover Beach, 1851

In other words, the universe is indifferent. All we really have is one another. A poem much debated and satirized.

ecib  ·  3733 days ago  ·  link  ·  

One of my favorite poems in the entire world.

Do you have Spotify? There is a particular version of that poem set to music, and opening with a beautiful reading of the first verses. It is by The Fugs, a music and poetry group in NYC from the 60's onward.

At any rate, they have this one haunting version that is much better than their other versions because of the reading in the beginning, -it's from their best of album, and the only place I've been able to find it online is Spotify. Dover Beach from their best of. Worth searching out.

I read it as essentially an existential love poem, where the "individual starting point" is two people instead of the one, while the world remains just as indifferent and absurd.