All 1 entries tagged Journal

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