(no subject)
When I found out I would be reading Frankenstein repeatedly for my Critical Approaches To Literature class, I cringed. I sighed. I sat back lower in my chair. I caught my own eye in the reflection of the classroom window and began contemplating ways to escape from the 3.25 hour class.
10 pages into the book, I LOVE IT.
"Nothing contributes so much to tranquillise the mind as a steady purpose,-- a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye..."
"I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans... it is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and magnificient; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavor to regulate my mind."
"You will smile at my allusion; but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean, to the production of the most imaginitive of modern poets. There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand. I am practically industrious - pains-taking; -- a workman to execute with perseverance and labour: -- but besides this, there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore."
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
I would post more and more, but the book should really just be read by all. The first ten pages, anyway.