EPUB Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell online touch offline macbook author

Book description

Book description
Nick Jenkins has the postwar blues. He finds himself after demobilisation adrift in a city dominated by ruined, abandoned houses, reflecting an inner emptiness that somehow has to be filled with something. The title suggests books as a solution, art in general. The actual source of the quote in the text is slightly different, with more of a sexual connotation, a subtle reminder that we also need a sense of humour, especially in troubled times. Borage (an excellent spirit to repress the fuliginous vapour of dusky melancholie. - Francis Bacon) and hellebore (what doesnt kills you makes you stronger) might also come in handy, at least according to one of Nicks favorite authors, Robert Burton. Borage and Hellebore is also the title of the academic study Nick Jenkins is currently (1946?) writing about Robert Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy magnum opus. The title page showed not only Burtons own portrait in ruff and skull cap, but also figures illustrative of his theme; love-madness; hypochondriasis; religious melancholy. The emblems of Jealousy and Solitude were there too, together with those sovereign cures for melancholy and madness, borage and hellebore. Melancholy in all its forms seemes to be the major theme of the last season in the Dance. In the opening scene, Nick returns to his alma mater for research, an occasion to think of all the social ties that were severely cut down by the six years of war. As the forlorn purlieus of the railway-station end of town gave place to colleges, reverie, banal if you like, though eminently Burtonesque, turned towards the relatively high proportion of persons known pretty well at an earlier stage of life, both here and elsewhere, now dead, gone off their rocker, withdrawn into states of existence they - or I - had no wish to share. The probability was that even without cosmic upheaval some kind of reshuffle has to take place halfway through life ... Nicholas has more than financial reasons for going back to university, to what Burton himself called a silent, sedentary, solitary private life . Coy as ever about his own family life, the narrator hints at the need for a quiet interval of introspection and life assessment, at the need to furnish his inner landscape with something of true value and significance, something that transcends the numerous worries about food stamps, shortages of every basic necessity, career direction and social upheaval, troubles that have left deep scars on the British society in the aftermath of the war. It was a bleak time, and the author is quick with his Victorian analogy: In the new year, without further compromise, Dickensian winter set in. Snow fell, east winds blew, pipes froze, the water main (located next door in a house bombed out and long deserted) passed beyond insulation and control. The public supply of electricity broke down. Baths became a fabled luxury of the past. Humps and cavities of frozen snow, superimposed on the pavement, formed an almost impassable barrier of sooty heaps at the gutters of every crossing, in the network of arctic trails. [...] Meanwhile, traditional textures of existence were laboriously patched together in an attempt to reaffirm some sort of personal identity, however blurred. The difficulties of picking up your social life after six years of war was best illustrated for me in the meeting with one of Nicks former friends, once a raconteur and a partygoer, now distant, distracted, introspective, morose (view spoiler)[ Moreland (hide spoiler)]
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EPUB Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell online touch offline macbook author

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