Subj : keeping notes
To   : August Abolins
From : Anton Shepelev
Date : Sun Feb 16 2020 21:03:42

August Abolins to Alexander Koryagin:

AA> I'm impressed with your likes. Ivanhoe is quite the epic
AA> and filled with very "formal"  yet  an  ancient  way  of
AA> speaking and writing.

formal *and* ancient, because most of the  time formal usage
is time-honoured usage.

AA> L-o-n-g sentences!

But more amenable to parsing  than,  say,  in  M.R.  James's
"Jolly corner":

  He  took  it  full in the face that something had happened
  between--that he couldn't have noticed before (by which he
  meant  on his original tour of all the rooms that evening)
  that such a barrier had  exceptionally  presented  itself.
  He  had indeed since that moment undergone an agitation so
  extraordinary that it might have muddled for him any  ear-
  lier  view; and he tried to convince himself that he might
  perhaps then have gone into the room  and,  inadvertently,
  automatically,  on  coming  out, have drawn the door after
  him.  The difficulty was that this  exactly  was  what  he
  never  did;  it  was against his whole policy, as he might
  have said, the essence of which was to keep vistas  clear.
  He had them from the first, as he was well aware, quite on
  the brain: the strange apparition, at the far end  of  one
  of  them,  of  his  baffled "prey" (which had become by so
  sharp an irony so little the term now to apply!)  was  the
  form  of  success his imagination had most cherished, pro-
  jecting into it always a refinement  of  beauty.   He  had
  known  fifty times the start of perception that had after-
  wards  dropped;  had  fifty  times  gasped   to   himself.
  "There!"  under some fond brief hallucination.  The house,
  as the case stood, admirably lent itself; he might  wonder
  at  the  taste,  the native architecture of the particular
  time, which could rejoice  so  in  the  multiplication  of
  doors--the  opposite  extreme  to  the  modern, the actual
  almost complete proscription of them; but  it  had  fairly
  contributed  to  provoke  this  obsession  of the presence
  encountered telescopically, as he might say,  focused  and
  studied  in  diminishing  perspective and as by a rest for
  the elbow.

This  entire  paragraph  feels  to  me  like  a  bumpy  road
whereover  one  (I) can hardly walk wighout he trips all the
time and falls often, hurting  one's  knees.   I  know  this
sentence  is  dubious,  but plead to Edrawd Albee, who wrote
(IIRC):

  A man can put up with only so much without he  descends  a
  rung or two down the old evolutionary ladder.

-- a strange constuction, perhaps colloqual...

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 * Origin: nntps://fidonews.mine.nu - Lake Ylo - Finland (2:221/360.0)

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