Wednesday, February 17, 2010

I got it!

Mommsen. Our second author. The History of Rome




I wasn't sure I would be able to get my hands on an abridged copy before our next meeting. Amazon only listed 2 available and those were gone before I could get them, ahem....

It's o.k though, thankfully I have a spouse in school with access to an excellent academic library containing a copy of the above.

Tonight we managed to get to the aforementioned library, locate the book and check it out before we got a parking ticket. Practically miraculous! Then to celebrate all of our hard work, and good luck, we went for beers and burgers. Was that smart? Perhaps not, but it was fun.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

First Meeting

Last night we had our first meeting. It was an auspicious beginning to what, I think, will be a fulfilling marathon of reading.

Rene Sully-Prudhomme (pen name) was a writer who proved to be great fuel for conversation. I think he was a man divided between his heart and his head. It seemed that he tried to reason his way through matters of the heart, which always fails miserably, all while being so artistically mature. But he was young and we were reading his journals, which of course, are never meant to be read publicly. But poems...

At The Water's Edge

To sit and watch the wavelets as they flow
Two - side by side;
To see the gliding clouds that come and go
And mark them glide;

If from low roofs the smoke is wreathing pale,
To watch it wreath;
If flowers around breathe perfume on the gale,
To feel them breathe;

If the bee sips the honeyed fruit that glistens,
To sip the dew;
If the bird warbles while the forest listens,
To listen too;

Beneath the willow where the brook is singing,
To hear its song;
Nor feel, while round us that sweet dream is clinging
The hours too long;

To know one only deep over mastering passion -
The love we share;
To let the world go worrying in its fashion
Without one care -

We only, while around all weary grow,
Unwearied stand,
And midst the fickle changes others knows,
Love - hand in hand


Rene Francois Armand Prudhomme

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Early Difficulties


When we hatched the idea for this adventure we imagined that it would be easy to find works by all of the authors, they're Nobel Prize winners after all, but the first two authors have proved us wrong.

We thought we found success at first when we located a book of Rene Sully-Prudhommes poems on Amazon. The listing said that the work was in English and 64 pages long. We ordered it, but when it came we were all disappointed to find that the book was actually in French and only sixteen pages long. Since none of us speak or read french the booklet was of no use to us.

Luckily we managed to find a book on Nobel laureates at the library that contained some poems by Sully-Prudhomme and selections from his journal, which gives us even greater insight into the mind of the poet than we expected. Our author won the prize when he was 62 and the selection of his journal that we have is from when he was in his twenties.

He seems to be heartbroken and melancholy. While he writes often of women he doesn't seem to really understand them. He is funny at times too, changing abruptly from one thing to the next and makes dramatic, sweeping statements that tend to the preposterous, here's one of my favorites:
"I cannot think how an ugly woman can appear at a ball; it does not make sense. It is a strange illusion on the part of women to imagine that the clothes make one forget about the face and the figure! I hate ugliness, I hate it to the point where I am harsh and unfair toward these poor disgraced creatures. Ugliness is a groping, a stupidity, a farce of nature's; it revolts me. An ugly woman covered in finery is and can only be a prop, and one regrets that the clothes do not hide her completely."
As if a woman appears at a ball only for the amusement of others! No wonder he was unsuccessful in love.

But I'm being hard on poor Rene. He is also full of very beautiful musings and observations on the nature of life and happiness, like this:
"...happiness is possible, it exists! These attacks of joy last for a minute at most with me, just long enough to plunge my face in the refreshing stream and to withdraw it, the time it takes for hope to wing its way through the night of thought and vanish..."
Lovely.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

List of Laureates

Here is a list of all of the Nobel Laureates in Literature.

There are 105 winners in all and if we read one author a month it will take us 8.75 years to finish. Hmmm...that's a bit more time than I thought....plus the eight more winners that will be new to the list. Yikes! That's committment!

This is from the Nobel Prize website: www.nobelprize.org

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The Beginning

January of 2010 we begin to read the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Our first author is Sully-Prudhomme, a French poet who won in 1901.