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Tag Archives: reality

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

31 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Edgar Allan Poe, Literature

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A Dream Within a Dream, Edgar Allan Poe, poem, Poetry, reality

By Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream
?

Imagination & the “bitter lapse”

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens

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Edgar Allan Poe, Imagination, poem, Poetry, reality, Short Story, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Plain Sense of Things

There is a fascinating conflict and paradox in this introduction. Poe works for the mysterious: In just a sentence after the quoted section he will write, “What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered.” He creates the effect by means of a prose which avails itself of poetic effects: alliteration, “during, dull, dark, day, dreary”; assonance, “dull, autumn, hung”. The sheer intensity of the description which piles gloom upon gloom.

And yet the brutality of the image lies in its intense realism “a mere house and the simple landscape features”. The bite is that is a real place, “the bitter lapse into everyday life”, rather than an opium fueled revelry. He complains that there is no poetic imagination which could attach to the building; which is ironic, because this house could actually exist nowhere. It reminds me of Stevens’ poem “The Plain Sense of Things”

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Poe’s oppressively real house exists only in the imagination — indeed, it can only be had and held by means of imagination, which makes it even more intensely real:

“DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.”

Edgar Allan Poe. “The Fall of the House of Usher”

A human life filled

11 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in Church History, George Muller, Prayer

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Arthur Tappan Pierson, Church History, Faith, faith, George Muller, Prayer, reality, Seen, Unseen

“A Human life, filled with the presence and power of God, is one of God’s choicest gifts to His church and to the world.
Things which are unseen and eternal seem, to the carnal man, distant and indistinct, while what is seen and temporal is vivid and real. Practically, any object in nature that can be seen or felt is thus more real and actual to most men than the Living God. Every man who walks with God, and finds Him a present Help in every time of need; who puts His promises to the practical proof and verifies them in actual experience; every believer who with the key of faith unlocks God’s mysteries, and with the key of prayer unlocks God’s treasuries, thus furnishes to the race a demonstration and an illustration of the fact that “He is, and is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.”
George Miiller was such an argument and example incarnated in human flesh”

Excerpt From: Arthur Tappan Pierson. “George Müller of Bristol.” James Nisbet. iBooks.

Foolishness and Time

31 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by memoirandremains in Biblical Counseling, Hebrews, Meditation, Psalms

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Biblical Counseling, Death, experience, foolishness, Hebrews, Hebrews 9, Hebrews 9:27, Humility, judgment, Meditation, Psalm 90, Psalms, reality, Self-Examination, Time

Often foolishness finds its cure in the conflict with reality. Thus, the foolish belief that I can skip class and not study will conflict with the reality of grades. After an F I will hopefully be cured of my foolishness.

Other forms of foolishness cannot be cured until it is too late to make a correction. Psalm 90 mentions one such problem:

So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Ps. 90:12.

There is a foolishness that comes from thinking the temporary is permanent. My days are short, but I easily and foolishly will live as if the days will go on forever.

This foolishness cannot be cured with experience, because by the experience intervenes, it will be too late.

There is also the foolishness that comes from failing to realize that I am permanent. To live one’s life as if there is no eternity before me is also foolishness. I must learn to number my days, because there will be a judgment.

Such a day may be a joy if I am to acquitted. But to do so, I must be reconciled to the judge:

27 And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment,
28 so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

Heb. 9:27-28

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