All entries for Wednesday 28 February 2007

New Beginnings

"He strode the balcony and watched the sea."

That's been my computer screen since yesterday.  It began as something much longer and more elaborate, I think with some mention of the thrash of waves, and I was so horrified by its indulgence (and, deep down, painfully lazy) that I haven't been able to go on to describe the sea in any detail since.  I'm not even sure if "strode the balcony" can count as proper English, but I wanted to avoid a rhythm-killing "across" as much as was humanly possible.

New beginnings, then, have often been hard for me, and writing about myself doubly so.  I tried to keep a journal at school: I'd normally just get down one overlong splurge of feverish self-analysis, read it back to myself, and then tear it up.  Hopefully this attempt will be different: this post, at least, I plan to keep very short, with no introductions, and just put in something I read a few days ago and am still mulling over.  It's often a real shame, to read something inferior by an writer you love, and so I was very happy, after eighty pages of self-conscious social witticisms in Dostoyevsky's Summer Impressions, to find this:

"In London you no longer see the populace.  Instead, you see a loss of sensibility, resigned, systematic, and encouraged...what is needed, on the contrary, is a higher degree of individuality than has hitherto been seen in the West."

Over a century ago...

: 28 Feb 2007 13:49 |  Tags: Beginning Dostoyevsky Introduction Journal Writing |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem