Clippings

Posts for Tag: juxtaposition

Habit: In Praise of Subtitles

At the HD broadcast of Eugene Onegin this afternoon, subtitles have given me more insight into the characters and action than I've ever had before. I was struck by the similarity of this line in the first scene

God sends us habit instead of happiness

To the conclusion of Pater's The Renaissance

Our failure is to form habits

In the second scene the Nanny is speaking of growing old, but her words could apply to the stroke experience as well.

...My brain is getting dark.
What I once knew I've forgotten.

Juxtaposition

Usually, I find juxtapositions in the same stream. Yesterday, I found these ideas separated by source, too.

First, on Twitter, I saw this—

A couple of hours later, I found these words on Tumblr in a tribute to Seamus Heaney by Dan Chiasson—

Heaney’s poems were full of finds, unlikely retrievals from the slime of the ground or the murk of history and memory. His poems about peat bogs and what they preserve are probably the most important English-language poems written in the past fifty years about violence—the ‘intimate, tribal revenge’ that underscores the news.

Reminds me that I've got to capture a stream of Tweets by Brian Phillips in tribute to Heaney.

Surprising Juxtaposition

Hendrix makes an awfully nice pairing with these lines from Martin Buber.

We cannot avoid using power
Cannot escape the compulsion to afflict the world
So let us
Mighty in diction
And powerful in contradiction
Love powerfully