Beloved, Hamlet and Housekeeping–late August Salons

Salons in August- early September 2015

  • Beloved by Toni Morrison –One evening Salon Intensive 01.09

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”– Beloved 

  • Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson One evening Salon Intensive 07.09

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

  • Hamlet by William Shakespeare –Two evenings: Wednesday August 26th & Sept. 2nd

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  • The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner Four meetings over four weeks– Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday evening schedule available starting 15.09.15

“They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

These brief studies offer a slide back into the rhythms of the Salons. If you are new to the Salons, this will give you a chance to sample the energy and exploration of the Salon meetings; previous participants may enjoy the contained intensity of one or two meetings. Registration information is available on the page for the listed Salons or under the courses list on the front page of the website. Please contact me if you have any questions.

 

Next week: Autumn Salons on Proust to be announced…also Ulysses 2016 will be open for registration..

Summer travels that includes old friends and loved places can be disorientating. Each place, each relationship, once I am there, seems the only place I have ever been, the only world I have ever known—all others feel a fiction…I forget who I am, who I have become as I return to the Adirondack lakes and mountains that contain my adolescence & first loves. This is so delicious for the moments of reconnection; but means that the parting requires a sacrifice of sorts, a shard of the heart.

I am reading about the nature of epic in Adam Nicolson’s The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters. He argues that epic’s value is not as a matter of memory nor history but ‘to make the distant past as immediate to us as our own lives, to make the great stories of long ago beautiful and painful now”. So many of the significant works of literature we engage in the Salon explore how we live the past—how we live with our own other stories, how we hold these in our present, how we live within the context of our cultural or ancestral histories—whether these are known or mysteries.

 

All of these stories imprint on the psyche. Our own immediate narratives as well as the greater narratives that define cultural values, norms and biases shade and colour our relationships with the world and each other. In our studies of literature, the overlays and shadings can be more clearly seen—sediments compacted that witness the endless complexity of the human story.

1 thought on “Beloved, Hamlet and Housekeeping–late August Salons”

  1. I am really looking forward to this study. Hamlet has certainly been in the news so the opportunity to study the text feels really timely and it may be easier to get into the salon than get tickets for the Barbican.

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