Thursday 5 August 2010

Steady there, chuckles

"I love you, not only because you are deformed; but because you are low. I love monsters, and I love mountebanks. A lover despised, mocked, grotesque, hideous, exposed to laughter on that pillory called a theatre, has for me an extraordinary attraction. It is tasting the fruit of hell. An infamous lover, how exquisite! To taste the apple, not of Paradise, but of hell; such is my temptation. It is for that I hunger and thirst. I am that Eve, the Eve of the depths. Probably you are, unknown to yourself, a devil. I am in love with a nightmare. You are a moving puppet, of which the strings are pulled by a spectre. You are the incarnation of infernal mirth. You are the master I require. I wanted a lover such as those of Medea and Canidia. I felt sure that some night would bring me such a one. You are all that I want. I am talking of a heap of things of which you probably know nothing. Gwynplaine, hitherto I have remained untouched; I give myself to you, pure as a burning ember. You evidently do not believe me; but if you only knew how little I care!"

Victor Hugo ~ 'The Man Who Laughs'  p195:
 
I don't know about you, but I read that and get the shudders.  Literature is amazing :)  That said, you think this is bad, try reading his Hunchback of Notre Dame.  It's a good deal different from the Disney movie and rather depressing.  Hugo was, if I have it correctly, living in a time when more people were starting to believe that there was nothing more to the world than the immediately reality we see around us (this was when most people in Europe were still Christian by rote so this was quite shocking stuff).  No spiritual element, no God, no nothing, just cold hard math.  To be fair, some of them found some wonder in that, but a lot of them set out out to show everyone else how the world could function without a God -and others how they couldn't- and that this was the way they should live.  So they wrote this idea into stories. 
 
Unfortunately for those that reckoned mankind could function without God, in these books everyone usually ends up either dead, about to die, or horribly depressed. 
Kinda shot yourselves in the foot there, didn't you guys :)

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