O.Wilde, Preface to 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. (...)
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. (...)
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. (...)
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself...

O. Wilde (1854-1900),
Preface to 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'


Thursday, September 08, 2011

The Wind Blows, K. Mansfield



Kathleen Mansfield
Beauchamp Murry                                 


1888, Wellington, New Zealand
1923, Fontainebleau, France


Prominent modernist writer of short fiction







The Wind Blows

Suddenly – dreadfully – she wakes up.  What has happened?  Something dreadful has happened.  No – nothing has happened.  It is only the wind shaking the house,  rattling the windows,  banging a piece of iron on the roof and making her bed tremble.  Leaves flutter past the window,  up and away; down in the avenue a whole newspaper wags in the air like a lost kite and falls, spiked on a pine tree.  It is cold.  Summer is over  –  it is autumn  –  everything is ugly…

The wind -  the wind!  There’s a funny smell of soot blowing down the chimney.  Hasn’t anyone written poems to the wind?...

The wind  –  the wind.

 
 
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