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ALICE was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?’
So she was considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterwards it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
From Alice in Wonderland, Lewis CarrollAh! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had
prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days,
and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth!
All his failure had been due to that. Better for him that each sin
of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it.
There was purification in punishment. Not “Forgive us our sins”
but “Smite us for our iniquities” should be the prayer of man to a
most just God.A new life! That was what he wanted. That was what he was waiting for.
Surely he had begun it already. He had spared one innocent thing,
at any rate. He would never lie again. He would be good.He took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs. As he unbarred the door,
a smile of joy flitted across his strangely young-looking face and lingered
for a moment about his lips. Yes, he would be good, and the hideous thing
that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror to him. He felt as if
the load had been lifted from him already.
In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity’s
sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that
now.But these lies were they to dog him all his life? Was he always to be
burdened by his past? Was he really to confess? Never. There was
only one bit of evidence left against him. The picture itself–
that was evidence. He would destroy it. Why had he kept it so long?
Once it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old.
Of late he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night.
When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes
should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions.
Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been
like conscience to him. Yes, it had been his conscience. He would
destroy it.He looked round and saw the dagger that had stabbed Basil Hallward.
He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it.
It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter,
so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that that meant.
It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.
It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings,
he would be at peace. He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture
with it.Picture of Dorian Gray extract
Oscar WildeDeath is my beat. I make my living from it. I forge my professional relationship on it. I treat it with the passion and precision of an undertaker — somber and sympathetic about it when I’m with the bereaved, a skilled craftsman with it when I’m alone. I’ve always thought the secret to dealing with death was to keep it at arm’s length. That’s the rule. Don’t let it breathe in your face.
But my rule didn’t protect me. When the two detectives came for me and told me about Sean, a cold numbness quickly enveloped me. It was like I was on the other side of the aquarium window. I moved as if underwater — back and forth, back and forth — and looked out at the rest of the world through the glass. From the backseat of their car I could see my eyes in the rearview mirror, flashing each time we passed beneath a streetlight. I recognized the thousand-yard stare I had seen in the eyes of fresh widows I had interviewed over the years.
I knew only one of the two detectives, Harold Wexler. I had met him a few months earlier when I stopped into the Pints Of for a drink with Sean. They worked in CAPS together on the Denver PD. I remembered Sean called him Wex. Cops always use nicknames for each other. Wexler’s is Wex, Sean’s, Mac. It’s some kind of tribal bonding thing. Some of the names aren’t complimentary but the cops don’t complain. I know one down in Colorado Springs named Scoto whom most other cops call Scroto. Some even go all the way and call him Scrotum, but my guess is that you have to be a close friend to get away with that.
Wexler was built like a small bull, powerful but squat. A voice slowly cured over the years by cigarette smoke and whiskey. A hatchet face that always seemed red the times I saw him. I remember he drank Jim Beam over ice. I’m always interested in what cops drink. It tells a lot about them. When they’re taking it straight like that, I always think that maybe they’ve seen too many things too many times that most people never see even once. Sean was drinking Lite beer that night, but he was young. Even though he was the supe of the CAPs unit, he was at least ten years younger than Wexler. Maybe in ten years he would have been taking his medicine cold and straight like Wexler. But now I’ll never know.
I spent most of the drive out from Denver thinking about that night at the Pints Of. Not that anything important had happened. It was just drinks with my brother at the cop bar. And it was the last good time between us, before Theresa Lofton came up. That memory put me back in the aquarium.
But during the moments that reality was able to punch through the glass and into my heart, I was seized by a feeling of failure and grief. It was the first real tearing of the soul I had experienced in my thirty-four years. That included the death of my sister. I was too young then to properly grieve for Sarah or even to understand the pain of a life unfulfilled. I grieved now because I had not even known Sean was close to the edge. He was Lite beer while all the other cops I knew were whiskey on the rocks.
Of course, I also recognized how self-pitying this kind of grief was. The truth was that for a long time we hadn’t listened much to each other. We had taken different paths. And each time I acknowledged this truth the cycle of my grief would begin again.My brother once told me the theory of the limit. He said every homicide cop had a limit but the limit was unknown until it was reached. He was talking about dead bodies. Sean believed that there were just so many that a cop could look at. It was a different number for each person. Some hit it early. Some put in twenty in homicide and never got close. But there was a number. And when it came up, that was it. You transferred to records, you turned in your badge, you did something. Because you just couldn’t look at another one. And if you did, if you exceeded your limit, well, then you were in trouble. You might end up sucking down a bullet. That’s what Sean said.
The Poet ~ Micheal Connelly
That was when I saw the Pendulum.
The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty.
I knew – but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing – that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by π, that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles. The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined by an arcane conspiracy between the most timeless of measures: the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane’s dimensions, the triadic beginning of π, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself.Umberto Eco ~ Foucault’s Pendulum
@pikey wrote:
That was when I saw the Pendulum.
The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty.
I knew – but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing – that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by π, that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles. The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined by an arcane conspiracy between the most timeless of measures: the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane’s dimensions, the triadic beginning of π, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself.Umberto Eco ~ Foucault’s Pendulum
CANT wait for the next instalment, my frown will be permanent!
You are just showing off there arent you….?
You should find a copy a read it, Ms Gooner. If you stick with it, it will cure you of Dan Brown forever.
My quote for the day…
Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending
@pikey wrote:
You should find a copy a read it, Ms Gooner. If you stick with it, it will cure you of Dan Brown forever.
Ive found a copycat of Mr Brown… he’s called Sam Bourne. The covers of his books even replicate the great Mr Brown, so I had to investigate, and I tell you what, he is pretty good! In my humble opinion anyway. :wink:
Good God. Fancy taking the Brown as your template. The man is obviously a money-fevered cretin. There can be no other explanation. I’d shun him and his works, if I were you. What’s with that new photo of yours? I like the other ones better. Anyroadup:
The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the city, to vandalise dormant energies by an act of ambulant signmaking. To walk out from Hackney to Greenwich Hill, and back along the River Lea to Chingford Mount, recording and retrieving the messages on the walls, lampposts, doorjambs: the spites and spasms of an increasingly deranged populace. (I had developed this curious conceit while working on my novel Radon Daughters: that the physical movements of the characters across their territory might spell out the letters of a secret alphabet. Dynamic shapes, with ambitions to achieve a life of their own, quite independent of their supposed author. Railway to pub to hospital: trace the line on the map. These botched runes, burnt into the script in the heat of creation, offer an alternative reading – a subterranean, preconscious text capable of divination and prophecy. A sorcerer’s grimoire that would function as a curse or a blessing.)
Iain Sinclair ~ Lights Out For The Territory
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