Tag Archives: Thomas Carlyle

“My thoughts bustle along like a Surinam toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, side, and belly, vegetating while it crawls.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

He looked at his own Soul with a telescope. What seemed all irregular, he saw and shewed to be beautiful Constellations: and he added to the Consciousness hidden worlds within worlds. –Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks It’s his birthday today. I’ll … Continue reading

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“These English songs gravel me to death. I have not the command of the language that I have of my native tongue. In fact, I think that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotch.” — Robert Burns, “the Ploughman Poet” of Scotland

“For my own part I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in Love, and then Rhyme and Song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart.” — Robert Burns … Continue reading

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The Storming of the Bastille: “Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible!”

July 14, 1789 Thomas Carlyle, in his majestic, overwrought and intimidating The French Revolution, describes the Siege of the Bastille in frenzied and apocalyptic-doomsday prose. You can hear Carlyle’s primal fear of the Crowd. The Crowd is simultaneously abstract and … Continue reading

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2013 Books Read

It’s been a hell of a year. Devastating as well as redemptive. I started it out in Memphis, and end it here in New Jersey. And now my new niece Pearl has arrived! It’s been both a busy year as … Continue reading

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Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Carlyle

“It was good of God to let [Thomas] Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.” — Samuel Butler

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“It is part of my creed that the only Poetry is History could we tell it right.”– Thomas Carlyle

Whether he got the French Revolution “right” is not only up for debate but irrelevant. After all, he wasn’t actually there. But Thomas Carlyle’s great (and difficult) and frenzied

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Snapshots from the weekend

— Rented Zodiac. It’s fantastic – just as good as everyone says. See it. — Had another one of my 700 dollar hair cuts and colors on Saturday (only, you know, I got it for free, cause of the whole … Continue reading

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Describing Thomas Carlyle

An amazing letter from Margaret Fuller to Ralph Waldo Emerson – where she describes Thomas Carlyle. I have been reading Carlyle’s incredible The French Revolution: A History , for, oh, 2 years now, off and on … I can only … Continue reading

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Summer Reading Challenge

I have joined a Summer Reading Challenge – hosted by and set up by Amanda. BOOKS I WILL READ (AND POST ABOUT) THIS SUMMER oh, and naturally I reserve the right to change this list at any time. But for … Continue reading

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Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle

It was good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four. — Samuel Butler on Thomas Carlyle

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