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Against Nature

Book by Joris-Karl Huysmans · 8 quotes · Literature, Solitude, رمان

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Against Nature Quotes

“The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life.”

“در واقع، هنگامی که انسانی برخوردار از موهبت استعداد و تیزهوشی ناگزیر باشد در دوران پر ملال تنگ نظری سفیهانه زندگی کند، هنرمند، ناخواسته و بی اختیار، گرفتار وسوسه ی پناه بردن به زمانه ای دیگر می شود.”

“از آنجایی که در این زمانه دیگر عنصر اصیلی پیدا نمی شود، از آنجایی که شرابی که می نوشیم و آزادی ای که مدعی اش هستیم تقلبی و تمسخرآمیزند، از آنجایی که در نهایت نیاز به حسن نیتی یگانه و منحصر داریم تا باور بیاوریم که طبقات فرادست قابل احترام اند و طبقات فرودست سزاوار آنند که از مصایبشان بکاهیم و بر محنت هایشان دل بسوزانیم، به اعتقاد من، نظری مسخره و جنون آمیز نخواهد بود، اگر از همنوع ام بخواهم که کمی تخیل به خرج دهد- تقریبا معادل اوهامی که، در زندگی روزمره اش صرف اهداف ابلهانه می شود.”

“The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period - orris-powder, musk, civet and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water - was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit. Later still, the blase, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and marechale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period. And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and in short resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians, the vulgar distillers of its poems.”