Past Salons – Long Works

Dante’s Divine Comedy

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Dante’s Divine Comedy

Dante1

Già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle,
sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa,
l’amor che move ’l sole e l’altre stelle.

Now my will and my desire were turned,
like a wheel in perfect motion,
by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

These breathtaking lines conclude Dante’s Divine Comedy, a 14,000-line epic written in 1321 on the state of the soul after death. T. S. Eliot called such poetry the most beautiful ever written—and yet so few of us have ever read it. Since the poem appeared, and especially in modern times, those readers intrepid enough to take on Dante have tended to focus on the first leg of his journey, through the burning fires of Inferno.

As I prepare opening notes for Dante’s Inferno, I am reading again about the medieval world view and how our idea of the human being has evolved. Dante offers a wonderful road into these deep and dense queries as his Divine Comedy is his attempt to construct an intellectual universe based on the visions of his faith. Several interested participants have wondered how the study of the Inferno might be approached if one is not formally religious. I am finding, as I did in the previous Paris-based study of this work, that the pilgrim’s exploration of his moral and spiritual universe—and the fantastic images that result—provide the reader a map for their own inquiry.

Dante fought the Church—his banishment from his beloved Florence was in part a result of his criticism of Pope Boniface and the political party he supported. His creation of the realms of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise were his attempt to bring his intellect and faith in alignment; a struggle that humans have been inspired by since Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Although I will provide background on the historical moment of Dante’s Florentine world and the political and ecclesiastical struggles that tore at his home, these are background to the very human pursuit: to understand the human soul. Although Dante’s terms are Christian, I do not think this desire is limited to the Christian realm. As always, the Salon conversation is enriched with a variety of perspectives, those who hold a formal faith as well as those who hold a formal questioning, along with those, (and I would place myself in this category) whose inquiry is loose and fluid and lifelong. We have so few spaces to share diverse views in religious ideas or spiritual traditions; I propose the study of a great work that engages a vigorous questioning of a formal belief offers that space.

From Inferno, we move towards the mountain of Purgatory. . .

As Dante explains in the opening lines of the canticle, Purgatory is the place in which “the human spirit purges himself, and climbing to Heaven makes himself worthy.” Dante’s Purgatory consists of an island mountain, the only piece of land in the southern hemisphere. Divided into three sections, Antepurgatory, Purgatory proper, and the Earthly Paradise, the lower slopes are reserved for souls whose penance was delayed. The upper part of the mountain consists of seven terraces, each of which corresponds to one of the seven capital sins. Atop the mountain Dante locates, Eden, the Earthly Paradise, the place where the pilgrim is reunited with Beatrice, the woman who inspired the poem. (from The World of Dante: http://www.worldofdante.org/purgatory1.html)

Then on to Paradise. . .

In each translation and writing about the Divine Commedia that I have consulted, the unanimous conclusion is that Paradise is the most difficult—the least likely to be read—the most likely to be started and not finished. We are warned by Dante himself, in the longest address to the reader, that if we have followed thus far in our little boat we should turn back now while we can still see the shores, lest in “losing me, you would be lost yourselves. . .” (l.5, Canto 2). How can we turn back now? I recognize the going will be tough and this might not be the most enjoyable Salon read- but I have not known any of us to shrink from challenge.

Dante has these challenges of ineffability as he attempts both to describe Paradise and his journey—the experience is beyond memory, the visions beyond human words. Here he uses the examples of the human need to put feet and hands on God, to give the Angels wings—we cannot conceive of what he has seen because we are still in our human state. Thus Dante himself must change—transhumanize—(Canto I, l. 70) to manage the journey, and we must shuffle along as best we can in our mortal skins to understand what Dante is offering.

“O you, who in some pretty boat,

Eager to listen, have been following

Behind my ship, that singing sails along

Turn back to look again upon your own shores;

Tempt not the deep, lest unawares,

In losing me, you yourselves might be lost.

The sea I sail has never yet been passed;

Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo,

And Muses nine point out to me the Bears.

You other few who have neck uplifted

Betimes to the bread of angels upon

Which one lives and does not grow sated,

Well may you launch your vessel

Upon the deep sea.”

― Dante Alighieri, Paradiso

SALON DETAILS:

  • Three six-meeting studies, one on each book of the Divine Comedy
  • Recommended editions:
    • Inferno by Dante Aligheri, translated by Mark Musa; Penguin Classics; ISBN-13: 978-0142437223
    • Purgatorio by Dante Aligheri, translated by Robin Kirkpatrick; Penguin Classics; ISBN-13: 978-0140448962
    • Paradiso by Dante Aligheri, translated by Mark Musa; Penguin Classics edition; ISBN-13: 978-0140444438

From Joseph Luzzi\’s illuminating article in American Scholar 03.16

How to Read Dante in the 21st Century

How to Read Dante in the 21st Century 

“Dante requires what Nietzsche called “slow reading”—attentive, profound, patient reading—because Francesca’s sparse, seemingly innocent-sounding words speak volumes about the kind of sinner she is. In the first place, she’s not “speaking” to Dante in a natural voice; she’s alluding to poetry. And it’s a very famous poem, Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore, “Love always returns to the gentle heart,” a gorgeous medieval lyric by Guido Guinizelli, one of Dante’s poetic mentors in the Sweet New Style, a movement in the late 1200s that nurtured Dante’s emerging artistic sensibilities. Francesca, by citing the poem and the Sweet New Style, is saying: it wasn’t my fault, blame it on love. Despite her prettiness, her sweetness, and her eloquence, she is like every other sinner in hell: it’s never their fault, always someone else’s. They never confess their guilt, the one thing necessary for redemption from sin. With one deft allusion, one lyrical dance amid the ferocious winds in the Circle of the Lustful, Dante delivers a magnificent psychological portrait of Francesca’s path to damnation.”

Aeschylus’ The Oresteia

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Aeschylus’ The Oresteia

From Beowulf through The Odyssey, our study of the classics informs our understanding of the role of art and literature in forming our sense of ourselves and human history. This will be the first Salon study of the Oresteia so will have the energy of new and unexplored territory. Aeschylus explores the shift from a world ruled by force and feud to a time when human rationale and the early ideas of civilisation start to inform law and behaviour.

From http://www.neebo.com/Textbook/the-oresteiab9780140443332/ISBN-9780140443332:

The only trilogy in Greek drama that survives from antiquity, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia is translated by Robert Fagles with an introduction, notes and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford in Penguin Classics. In the Oresteia Aeschylus addressed the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos. As they move from darkness to light, from rage to self-governance, from primitive ritual to civilized institution, their spirit of struggle and regeneration becomes an everlasting song of celebration. In Agamemnon, a king’s decision to sacrifice his daughter and turn the tide of war inflicts lasting damage on his family, culminating in a terrible act of retribution; The Libation Bearers deals with the aftermath of Clytemnestra’s regicide, as her son Orestes sets out to avenge his father’s death; and in The Eumenides, Orestes is tormented by supernatural powers that can never be appeased. Forming an elegant and subtle discourse on the emergence of Athenian democracy out of a period of chaos and destruction, The Oresteia is a compelling tragedy of the tensions between our obligations to our families and the laws that bind us together as a society. Aeschylus (525-456 BC) was born near Athens. He wrote more than seventy plays, of which seven have survived, all translated for Penguin Classics: The Supplicants, The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides. If you enjoyed The Oresteia, you might like Euripides’ Medea and Other Plays, also available in Penguin Classics.

‘Conveys more vividly and powerfully than any of the ten competitors I have consulted the eternal power of this masterpiece … a triumph’ –Bernard Levin

‘How satisfying to read at last a modern translation which is rooted in Greek feeling and Greek thought … both the stature and the profound instinctive genius of Aeschylus are recognised’ –Mary Renault, author of The King Must Die

The Waves

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Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

9780141182711

“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape—shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Reading Virginia Woolf requires a releasing of the faculty we have so carefully trained to be grounded in time and fact. Her fluid and probing prose allows such a deep and troubling glimpse in to the human heart that one comes away wiser and broader than before. This is not my first floating into The Waves—what I have already tasted makes me want to swim far out into her embracing world of character and reflection.

This review from a GoodReads reader sounds perfect for the Salon!!

My umpteenth reading of The Waves and it still floors me. There’s not a wasted word here: Woolf’s attention to rhythm—she was listening to Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat Minor, Opus 130 while writing this novel, and Beethoven’s nuances are found in her prose at all turns—and the ways in which she questions subjectivity, interpersonal relations, the ways in which we are connected and yet disparate from those around us are on display here more so than in any of her other fictional works.

The last section is sadly not as famous as the last section in Joyce’s Ulysses, but it may well be even more gut-wrenchingly brutal in its philosophical underpinnings and the ways in which Woolf engages with poetics to sustain the flow of her inquiries into what it means to be human. On each reading there is something more to be found here, something more to be learned, something to relish and treasure, some keen diamond-edged truth that slices just as much as it illuminates.

Salon Details

  • Four-meeting study
  • Recommended edition:
    • The Waves by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Kate Flint; Penguin edition (2000); ISBN-13: 978-0141182711
      OR
    • The Waves by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Jeanette Winterson; Vintage Classics Ed. (Oct. 2016) ; ISBN-13: 978-1784870843

To the Lighthouse in St Ives

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Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse–St Ives Weekend Study

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”

― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf spent much of her childhood in St. Ives. The London Literary Salon invites you to join us in St Ives to explore this lovely coastal town and have it serve as a prism through which we will explore Woolf’s perspectives on landscape, domesticity and identity in her novel To The Lighthouse. We have already completed two magical weekends in this book in the environment that inspired it– this is an incredible experience!

You will have the opportunity to visit the iconic Tate St. Ives gallery overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, built between 1988 and 1993 on the site of an old gasworks, and there will be an optional boat trip to Godrevy Lighthouse. We may also look at Talland House, now privately owned, her childhood summer home.  For several months of the year the elegant house overlooking St. Ives Bay would be the Stephens’ family home until 1895 when Virginia’s mother Julia Stephen died.  Although the complete family never returned to St. Ives following their mother’s death, her children travellled back in 1905 following the death of their father in 1904.

This is something I have dreamed of doing since I first read Woolf’s magical book To the Lighthouse–it has haunted me always. The opportunity to study this work with a keen group of minds in the place that is so crucial to the writing is simply delicious.

“If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without doubt stands upon this memory.  It is of lying in bed, half-asleep, haf awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one two, behind a yellow blind. . . . If I were a painter I should paint these impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green.  There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers.”

“Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank.”

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surace of a deep river.  Then one sees through the surface to the depths.  The past sometimes presses so close that you can feel nothing else.”

—Virginia Woolf, “Sketch of the Past,” begun in June 1939.

Salonsitas going to the Lighthouse

SALON DETAILS

  • Friday – Sunday weekend  in St. Ives with one Monday preparation meeting in London.
  • Recommended edition: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Hermione Lee; Penguin Classics; (ISBN 0-14-118341-1)

More on the study:   

As one of the primary modernist works, To the Lighthouse demonstrates Woolf at play with language; testing the ability of language to truly reflect human experience by recording the life of the mind not just action. One of the characteristics of Modernist writing is a shifting centre of narrative perspective reflecting a questioning of ultimate and moral authority that characterized the time with the dissolution of Imperialism and absolute values.

Writing from the edge of the violent shift from Victorian to Modernist era, Woolf’s ambivalence is demonstrated in work. She struggles against the boundaries and structures of the Victorian era while holding a great longing and nostalgia for the noble traditions of the time. Her model, Mrs. Ramsey, (Queen-like) holds her daughters to the awe of the noble men that surround her and allows them to “sport with infidel ideas…of a life different…in Paris perhaps; …for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry…though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts…” (TtL, pgs. 10-11)

This quote also demonstrates the Modernist reworking of absolute truth…it is not a question of either this (a male-dominated world) or that (a world of female emancipation): the apparently rigid gender roles borrow from each other—“manliness in their girlish hearts” , “Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection…”: there is another Imperialism her, an intimate Imperialism of female over male. The truth in this work is not rigid (although Mr. R would like it to be) but can be permeated, blended…seen from another view.

Re-reading Hermione Lee’s biography (review quoted below) this reading has me turning over the search one makes for lost childhood—often for a place that might hold a time—but of course, never does. For Woolf, that search included a grappling with the impact & idealization of the parent figures—especially the lost mother, whose influence and contradictions continue to wrap around the child inside. VW and a few of her siblings returned to the house in St. Ives (that we are lucky enough to visit) years after her mother’s death and the sale of the house. They were like ghosts, sneaking around the gardens, peering in the windows: as though searching for their lost selves and a past that can never be re-captured. That visit—and the need to lay to rest her grief enwrapped memories of her mother—were the catalyst for TtL.

For those who want to go further, here is an excerpt of a review of Hermione Lee’s wonderful biography. The book, Virginia Woolf is a great read.

From ‘This Loose, Drifting Material of Life’ by Daphne Merkin
“Ms. Lee documents the evolving perception of her subject from ”the delicate lady authoress of a few experimental novels and sketches, some essays and a ‘writer’s’ diary, to one of the most professional, perfectionist, energetic, courageous and committed writers in the language.” She does this without recourse to the politicized agendas of the academy or special pleading (all of Woolf’s flaws are on display here); this account sets itself above the fray, the better to home in on the glittery and elusive creature at its center — the prize catch in what one critic has described as the Bloomsbury pond.
From its very first page Ms. Lee’s book is informed by current thinking on how to approach the writing of someone’s life: “There is no such thing as an objective biography, particularly not in this case. Positions have been taken, myths have been made.” But it is also infused with a very personal passion for her subject, which enables the author to cut crisply through the labyrinth of theories that have sprung up…”

Although To the Lighthouse is not autobiographical, many critics & readers have found close parallels between Woolf’s early life and the world presented in the book. It may help you to have a sense of Virginia Woolf and her precarious position as a visionary on the edge of violently changing world, as we go into the read. I will have more biographical notes for you when we start.

To the Lighthouse

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Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

beach

“Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke…”

—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

In this exquisite work, Woolf seeks to break through the restraints of language to access the interior voice of passions, fears, unspeakable thoughts and human dynamics. By employing stream of consciousness narrative and the early stirrings of the modernist aesthetic, Woolf gives insights into the nature of relationships and the formation of self in relation to others that will be recognisable – and revealing to each reader.

Eudora Welty writes in her forward to To the Lighthouse: “Radiant as [TtL] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.”

SALON DETAILS

  • Five-meeting study
  • Recommended edition: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Hermione Lee; Penguin Classics; (ISBN 0-14-118341-1)

Orlando

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Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.”

― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I have worked with many of Virginia Woolf’s texts, and each one leaves me breathless with its narrative beauty, unique aesthetic and remarkable understanding of the depths of the human mind. Orlando is new territory for me: an ironic biography – or possibly a love letter to Vita Sackville-West – or perhaps imagined autobiography? Critics disagree on how to categorise this book, making it all the more intriguing.

The proposal of Virginia Woolf as a comic genius is not how we usually consider this writer of such depth and nuance. In Orlando, Woolf seeks to probe the limits of gender before gender was understood to be a societal construct – ahead of her time, as always. The central character survives centuries and does the Tiresias – by changing genders, the character gets the unique ability to compare what it is to be male and what it is to be female. As always, reading this work and the discussions that will be provoked – around gender, same-sex love, societal constraints and the search for joy across historical epochs – will illuminate the chaotic world we live in,where gender continues to be problematised and re-considered.

SALON DETAILS

  • One meeting study
  • Recommended edition: Orlando by Virginia Woolf Vintage Classics (October 2016) ISBN-10: 1784870854

Mrs Dalloway

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Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Mrs-Dalloway-Oxford World Classics Edition

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone;
she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

–Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s writing hits emotion first—‘what happens’ takes second place to ‘what feels’. The language is packed with subtlety, nuance and evocative images as Woolf probes the depths of intimate relationships. Come join us for this exploration of a warm June day in London: madness, aesthetics, the nature of love and intimacy, war, relationships across and between genders, Imperialism—all are prodded in this delicate and lyric work.

Mrs Dalloway makes an ideal study: her writing is challenging to read on one’s own, rich as it is in images, references and details that deliver a powerful emotional and intellectual impact. The study format encourages exploration by reading with a group of diverse and questing minds. Together we will work to understand Woolf’s incisive study of human personality—and use some of her contemporaries (Freud, Henri Bergson, Roger Fry) to help make sense of this new writing she creates. Here is Julia Briggs from her biographical study of Woolf through her works:

“Mrs. Dalloway is the story of a day in the lives of a man and woman who never meet—a society hostess who gives a party, and a shell-shocked soldier… What they have in common or why their stories are told in parallel, the reader must decide, for this is a modernist text, an open text, with no neat climax or final explanation, and what happens seems to shift as we read and reread. Woolf intended her experiment to bring the reader closer to everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery and uncertainly, rejecting the artificial structures and categories of Victorian fiction.”

SALON DETAILS

  • Four meeting study
  • Recommended edition: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Oxford World’s Classics edition; ISBN-13: 978-0199536009

The Aeneid

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Virgil’s Aeneid

“Arma virumque cano. . .”

“Wars and a man I sing–an exile driven on by on by Fate. . .”

T.S. Eliot claimed that the Aeneid is the ultimate ‘classic’: “our classic, the classic of all Europe.” Even more than Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, the Aeneid is probably the one text from classical antiquity that has had the longest continuous influence over the later Western tradition. Taking both of Homer’s great epics as his models, Virgil created a hero and a poem that are uniquely his own—and that are distinctly Roman. Through them he told his story of the formation of a vast imperial power, and the human cost of that process.

The Aeneid is a grand poem of adventure, heroism, duty and love, recounting along the way the famous tale of the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy, Aeneas’ love affair with the doomed Queen Dido, his journey into the underworld, and ultimate settlement of Aeneas and the survivors of Troy in Italian lands. Salon participants who have studied Dante will recognize in the Aeneid the tension between personal and political, as the hero Aeneas struggles with and against his duty to carry forth the remnants of a fallen Troy to a new land from which will spring the grandeur of Rome.

This study is the third of a three-study sequence, covering Homer’s Iliad, Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. New participants are welcome to join the sequence with this study; familiarity with the preceding books is not required.

SALON DETAILS

  • Six meeting study
  • Recommended edition: Virgil’s The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles, introduction by Bernard Knox; Penguin Classics; ISBN-13: 978-0143106296

The Transcendentalists

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The Transcendentalists: Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman

from anti-materialism.weebly.com

(photo from anti-materialism.weebly.com)

“I should have told them at once that I was a Transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations.”

—Thoreau, Journal, V:4

The writings of the Transcendentalists may seem daunting– but their vision informs the mission of many contemporary grass-roots campaigns. Their focus on individual sled-knowledge and engagement with the world we inhabit is increasingly crucial to our human (and humane) existence. There are moments of real beauty in these dense readings– just when we are encountering the most complex ideas, the writer offers a moment of effervescence– a lifting towards light and illumination. For this study, we will consider aspects of Thoreau and Emerson’s essays and a selection from “Song of Myself” by Whitman.

Just listen:

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

32. I think I could turn and live with animals, they\’re so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
They do not make me sick discussiong their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.

52. The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.”

Wild, yes?

Walt_Whitman_-_Brady-Handy_restored-800x1024

“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Vanity Fair

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William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in Portugal

Vanity Fair Cover NortCrit

This Salon travel study was offered September 17 & 18 2017

Listed as the 14th best novel in Guardian’s 100 Best Novels: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/23/william-thackeray-vanity-fair-100-best-novels.

From Good Reads reviewer John Purcell :

“Make sure that you read William Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair in public, not in the hope that someone may spot you reading a classic, but so that you may see the characters of this wonderfully perceptive (and prophetic) novel wandering about in the flesh. Vanity Fair is populated not by characters but by real people and thus, will never date.

“Thackeray is masterful, he allows his characters the freedom to do as they please; they are autonomous and must make decisions on their own, as must we all. Some choose poorly, and yet succeed. Some choose well and yet are rewarded by misfortune. Some grab and grumble, some laugh and give, some believe they are masters of their own destinies while some are cut down in their prime.

“In Vanity Fair, Thackeray has captured humanity in the raw – just after getting out of bed and before our first cup of coffee. You will delight in discovering people you know in its pages. You may smile when they reveal themselves as cads, you may cry when those who deserve better are treated cruelly and you may laugh when the frauds get their comeuppance.

“But be warned, read Vanity Fair and enjoy the show, but know that somewhere within is pages lurks a soul much like your own, and when you least expect it, maybe when you’re laughing hardest at the foibles of another, you will recognise yourself and be silenced.

“For whether you know it or not, we all live in the pages of Vanity Fair.”

Recommended edition: Vanity Fair by William Thackeray;  Norton Critical Edition; ISBN: 978-0-393-96595-7

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