RICHARD MAXWELL: //goes on and on at great length about how Dickens complained at having to 'condense' this novel for weekly installments instead of monthly
IRONY: //throws herself on a chaise lounge, sobs, eats bonbons
MAXWELL: Also, this novel is not historically accurate!
MOI: you don't say
MAXWELL: 'This admirable but problematic study (The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom) offers a rich trove of Bastille-lore; however, having discovered that certain motifs and images have a life of their own, the authors seem occasionally close to supposing that there was no Bastille, only a closed set of literary conventions and political polemics about it.'
MOI: damn you Derrida
DICKENS: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.'
MOI: ....hunh, that is....not what pop culture always makes it sound like.
DICKENS: I KNOW, RIGHT
MOI: Also, funny!
DICKENS: 'It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set aside to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But, that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently....'
HARDY: Hey, that's MY thing --
MOI: 'Bespattered'?
DICKENS: //defensively It was the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine!
RICHARD MAXWELL: Now, if you read Carlyle's French Revolution --
MOI: NO.
DICKENS: 'A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted
to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn
consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those
darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every
one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the
hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a
secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death
itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear
book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I
look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary
lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other
things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a
spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was
appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the
light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore.
My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul,
is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret
that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to
my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I
pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are,
in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?'
MOI: Aww yeah. //settles in
And a final word from that encyclopedia of our times:
'The opposite of resurrection is of course death.[citation needed]'
(I admit I was torn between this and 'As is common in English literature, good and evil are symbolised by light and darkness.[citation needed]')
descensus Averno facilis est