if you had an acoustic guitar
I sure am getting a lot of spam in Portuguese.
Last night I figured out how Song of Roland needs to end. It's an utter downer, as if the book up to this point has been anything else. Aesthetically, it's clearly the right ending—it "comes shut with a click, like a closing box," as Yeats said (or words to that effect). But Lord, I honestly didn't think my view of life was quite this bleak. The thing is that it pretty well articulates April's long post on the insufficiency of love (romantic, familial, what have you), which basically comes to:
I. Damaged people cannot properly love.
II. We're all damaged.
III. We need it anyway.
Toss in the characters dying of cancer left and right, and it's a regular pity party. I asked Marlowe if he thought that a miserable ending completely ruins a book's hope of success, and he replied, "No, Paul. It jacks up your street cred. Think Shakespeare. We're all going to die." I guess that is what King Lear reduces to, in a sense.
After that I happened to pick Sons and Lovers off the shelf, and it happened to fall open to what is obviously the right epigraph:
And he did not kiss her, for fear she should be cold and strange to him.
If you insist on causal logic, you could always say it did that because I've perused that death scene so many times, but all the same.
"I can smile about it now," says the comments box, "but at the time it was terrible—"
Also, we have all these new species of tiny octopuses (not "octopi," mind you, which is a false plural form, based on the inaccurate assumption that "octopus" is a Latin rather than a Greek word).
