The 3 gods preside over the Arts.
Pallas Athena sends out the rays
of visions into the memory temple;
Vulcan grasps the beams of light
and grows them into red hot fires;
Mars receives the divine artifices
and perfects them into treasures.
Tag: literature
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angst
We can’t be here
While going nowhere
Chasing a mirage
In a concrete oasis.
Walking on a thin ice
With the misty eyes
Ire roars, passion heats
Miracles are imageries
Angels are too high above
We don’t want to be here.
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crystal night
The misfit stars gathered together
To try their luck elsewhere whither.
Those that fell to the earth at night
Became crystals with hues of night
Sparkling wantonly in a ring of swan
A dazzling enchantment on my palm.
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the good people
Thunder and lightning swirling
The palace of heaven tumbling
The Angels of Mutiny are falling
Falling below, downward, falling
into the sea and the earth.
While the light of Divine Grace
still flickers on the scraped wings,
They become the Good People
too vivacious to be in Hell.
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‘Father Goriot’, by Honore de Balzac – reading notes
Balzac’s Paris is no more different from today’s big cities like Los Angeles or New York City. It populates with the good, the bad, and the ugly, but mostly filling the in-betweens by the middling’s – the not-so-wretchedly poor yet decidedly needy with pride and prejudice –. The story about Father Goriot (no, he’s not a priest.) is about the people around him living inside and outside the Maison Vauquer. It is a boarding house in which the characters bring their stories to pay their dues of existence. The reader sees it as a microscopic view of the contemporary Parisian society where the poor, even in post-revolution, remains at the bottom of society—only the cold, indifferent climb up to the upper echelon.
The residents of the widow Madame Vauquer are neither defiantly evil nor angelically good but realistically neutral. The house symbolizes the society of the somebodies who long for social mobility for respect and recognition. Balzac’s passionate narrative endures no sight of injustice and proudly averts the eye from inhumanity, making even egotism and selfishness move to a pity dipped in pathos.
Balzac is a superb writer with detailed descriptions of the state of mind in the art of realism in a classical frame that makes scenes of everyday life a sight of history, banality of ordinary life a profundity of human life. Indeed, any of his famous fellow writers could have done it, but none of them can do it as blatantly well as Balzac does. For he knows how to make a villain sympathetic with an insightful eye looking into the depth of his wounded soul.
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‘Owl at Home’, by Arnold Lobel – book review
Owl at Home by Arnold Lobel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
We all have natural octaves for narratives of ourselves to speak in various notes and tempos. But Arnold Lobel’s is a fugue of loneliness, disappointment, sadness, and longing vested in the good-heartedness and geniality. ‘Owl at Home’ is Lobel’s ballad of melancholic warmth that sings his heart’s song.
This little book tells of an owl who lives alone in the treehouse. The owl has the comforts of life, from a comfy sofa to a pillowy bed and a beautiful teapot set, but not a life companion to speak. So the owl invites winter with a wide-open door, even if the wind sweeps over the house’s warmth rudely. But that’s not it. He makes tea from his tears of sad thoughts by pouring them into a jar. Hence his tea is named ‘tear-water tea.’ Oh, and yes, the lonely owl wants to befriend a moon that he regards too beautiful and lofty to be acquainted with. The melancholy ballad has such a simple loveliness that it touches the reader’s heart and transforms pathos into sympathy.
The book’s genre is officially and publicly children’s literature, but that doesn’t mean that readers aged beyond 18 years can’t. While reading the book, I kept associating the owl, the likable solitary owl, with the author and illustrator Lobel, whose life was also ended in a lonely man’s theme. Bullies tattered Lobel’s childhood at schools due to his weak disposition and shyness, which made him estranged from the crowd of life, being utterly unattached and felt unwanted and unfit for happiness. Likewise, the goodhearted but quixotic owl is Lobel himself at his saddest, loneliest, and paradoxically best because the truth about him lays bare through the narratives. The author’s beautiful illustrations delineate the shape of his heart that is warm and generous and move a feeling of pity for the dreadful solitude to a sense of love with a sound of mirth.
View all my reviews
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
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