Quotes Analysis
King Lear, act 1 lines 310-320 (Shakespeare, 1605). Cordelia falls out of favor with her father after the sisters show their false loyalty to him. The passage is psychologically extremely interesting because it emphasizes the combination of honesty of heart and intense mental suffering intertwined in Cordelia’s character. She says she sees right through her sisters, but despises them so much that she refuses to name their hypocritical sins out loud. In this martyrdom, the special nobility and sincerity of the character of Cordelia is manifested.
A separate noteworthy passage in the second act of King Lear is the third scene, which presents the monologue of the minor character. Edgar is a prince slandered by his brother, forced to flee the castle, pretending to be a vagabond. His monologue is extremely dynamic and tells another story of betrayal, which is one of the central themes of the tragedy. The theme of the fall of the human spirit and the forced abandonment of normal life seems to be a fascinating and even romantic motive that can be noticed in the monologue.
“O Aeolus! For to thee the King of Heav’n” is the appeal of the goddess Juno to the god-lord of the wind with a plea to take revenge on her sworn enemies and sink their ships (Virgil, 29). This fragment seems quite emotional due to the amount of anger that is felt in the inexhaustible desire to take revenge on the Trojans who destroyed Carthage, the city that worships her. The majestic and grandiose spontaneous images sounding in the monologue enhance the feeling of cosmic proportions inherent in this epic poem.
Chapter three in the book of Genesis tells about the temptation of a woman by the serpent and the violation of the prohibition on eating fruits from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 3). This passage seems not only extremely poetic, but also mysterious and majestic. The chapter not only gives an idea of the ideal world order before the fall of man to Earth, but also makes one think about whether this order was not a test for man. The motive for the expulsion of Adam from Eden and the punishment of the human race is one of the most magnificent stories of sin. Particularly beautiful and symbolic in this chapter seems to be the last sentence, which gives the image of an armed angel-cherub, put on guard of the tree of eternal life. It symbolizes the prohibition imposed by God on immortality, which explains both human depravity and the finiteness of human life, together with God’s harsh justice.
An extremely inspiring and gripping passage in Genesis is chapter 8, which deals with the flood. One of the most remarkable features of the Bible is its unique ability to enclose in a short, succinct amount of text such plots that could serve as the basis for an entire novel. The story of the righteous Noah, who created an ark for all animals so that God could cleanse the Earth of bad people, is a magnificent story about the higher powers in human life (Genesis 8). At the end of the chapter, the Lord himself says that he will no longer cast curses on people, which gives a philosophical dimension to this chapter, forcing one to think about God’s mercy and its nature.
Reflection
In the process of accumulating a collection of quotes from the course on close reading, I had to rethink many questions about why I like certain literary texts. The reader should be vigilant about the question of their own taste and interest. It is in order not only to be able to navigate in what he read, but also not to lose the critically important feeling of reading for his own pleasure. Despite the fact that the texts presented in the list for the close reading course are very old and for the most part belong to the category of the ancients, this is what determines their specificity. The authority of each of these works is extremely high – in fact, we are considering a list of the main works ever created by man, monuments of world literature. But precisely because of the high status of these texts, it was interesting for me to find something of my own in each of them.
Initially, my task was to find the most classic, historically important fragments, but in the end I began to orient myself in the search for quotes to my own intuition and taste. For the most part, the passages I have chosen are monologues, each of which is filled with emotional experience and passion. Pronounced on stage by characters, or by heroes in a poetic text, they contain a deep emotional charge, emphasized by the conflict of the plot layer. Even taken out of context, the quotes are able to speak for themselves and express a full-fledged message – e.g. Edgar’s monologue from King Lear, which is a compelling and independent story.
The Bible passages selected for inclusion in the Book also have a special meaning for me. The Old Testament is a diverse universe of amazing and bizarre stories about the relationship between man and God. It seems to me that in this text human ideas about morality and spirituality are being formed. While Virgil in The Aeneid gives the Roman gods an emotional and human psychological dimension, God in the Bible represents a single supreme being. Perhaps that is why biblical stories find in modern man a greater resonance than Greek myths – a person in them is dependent on higher powers and trusts in their mercy. These stories are more about a person and his faith than about God himself or the gods.
I can confidently say that in the process of compiling my collection of quotations, I reconsidered my views on the history of literature itself. The texts are presented to me as a way of knowing the history of the development of the human mind. The history of an entirely different civilization is captured in Virgil’s grandiose poem The Aeneid, while the book of Genesis describes whole generations of peoples replacing each other. Shakespeare’s King Lear also does not seem like a superfluous work among these great texts – the drama of the plot and the power of the poetic syllable deservedly make tragedy a key work of world literature. Collecting outstanding quotes, I realized that humanity develops along with its ability to deep feeling and the ability to reflect on it. Each of the texts and each of the selected quotations represent a stage in the development of human culture, a rich worldview and artistic vocabulary for its expression.
References
Shakespeare, W. (1605). The tragedy of King Lear. Folger Shakespeare Library. Web.
The Book of Genesis. Web.
Virgil. (29). The Aeneid. The Project Gutenberg. Web.