an exercise book

notes.

[anexercisebook-blog1]

What are 'empires' and how have they changed through time?

In what circumstances do ethnic and/or linguistic identities become important?

How have political leaders sought to legitimise their power?

Is there a relationship between the economic base of a society and its political structure?

Is it possible to separate religion and politics?

Has the Lecture Core Course been simply a history of 'dead white men'?

Where have new ideas come from and how have they spread?

Account for the rise and fall of 'great powers'.

How have the meanings of freedom and slavery changed through time?

Analyse the genesis of representative government.

Explain the role of universities in European Culture.

Is there Nationalism before Industrialisation?

How far and how has Europe been held together by institutions?

Is ‘Europe’ useful as a conceptual tool for historians?

‘Inessentials aside, the history of Europe is the history of the West’. Discuss.

‘Disjuncture, rather than continuity, characterises the history of marriage.’ Discuss.

‘Common Law is the principle common factor in the institutional history of English-speaking regions.’ Discuss

How have the concepts of subject and citizen been understood? Discuss the concept of monarchy. 

Write a review article discussing any three highly regarded general historical books. You must select books that enable you to discuss at least three of the following periods: ancient, medieval, early modern, modern.

[anexercisebook-blog1]

"The Dynamics of Ancient Empires" -- notes & related thoughts [1. Ancient States, Empires, and Exploitation]

(authors: Jack A. Goldstone & John F. Haldon)

i. Problems and Perspectives

definition of a state -- variations & difficulties of

Marx: social formations which represent & maintain property relations and social power; instrument of domination by ruling class

Max Weber: system of institutions; impersonal relationships; central power which monopolises coercive power

"... a key element in the formation and degree of permanence of such formations [as territorially unified political entities with an organisational centre] is that the authority of the ruler or ruling group is recognised as both legitimate and exclusive. In this respect, the ideological aspect is absolutely fundamental to state-building"

"A key element in state formation is the generation of fairly complex ideological and legitimating systems, on the one hand, and at the same time more impersonalised and institutionalised modes of surplus extraction than proto-states or clan or tribal groupings are capable of developing"

role of religion in state formation: "In Weber's concept, a focus around sacred monarchical and priestly authority is seen as one important initial stimulus to the formation of administrative-bureaucratic institutions evolved to secure the surpluses required for the temple and related religious-social functions"; "Administration based on kinship and lineage relationships, and the exploitation of kin-based modes of subordination, tend then gradually to be replaced by non-kinship-based bureaucratic or administrative systems" -- discussion of the Catholic Church inThe Origins of Political Order supports this & is supported by it -- growth of the church as a powerful & autonomous institution, & effect of this on the development of similar secular institutions

"Traditional man can sometimes escape the tyranny of kings, but only at the cost of falling under the tyranny of cousins, and of ritual. The kin-defined, ritually orchestrated, severely demanding and life-pervading systems of the 'ancient city', in Fustel de Coulanges's sense, may indeed succeed at least for a time in avoiding tyrannical centralization, but only at the cost of a most demanding culture, one which modern man would find intolerably stifling. Roughly, the general sociological law of agrarian society states that man must be subject to either kings or cousins, though quite often, of course, he is subject to both. Kings generally dominate societies through the intermediary of local institutions and communities, so that a tyrant at the centre is sustained by local institutions, and vice versa." -- Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty

"In most examples, a bureaucratic-administrative structure of some sort confers a clear advantage and appears to be a necessity of the political system is to retain its nontribal existence and cohesion ... a crucial role was played by religion as a unifying element providing a new, supra-kinship set of relationships, identities, and loyalties [point first made by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldun]"

"the formation of a state, and the civilisation process it may represent, is never a single event but rather a longer-term evolutionary process in which social habits and institutions and state organisations respond to changing conditions ... where they fail to respond adequately, the state fails to develop further and fails" -- what Samuel Huntington defined as "political decay"

Some states may "move toward the establishment of a permanent and self-regenerating body of administrators, which draws its recruits from either specific groups within the state (tribal groups, for example), from particular family dynasties, or from those of a particular social or cultural background (which includes the establishment of slave bureaucracies and armies [e.g. Mamluks], deracinated from their original social and cultural context and dependent entirely on the system to which they owe their position). They thus tend to evolve institutional structures -- fiscal systems, military organisations, and so forth -- that establish their own sets of roles and discourses, divorced from the daily practices of "ordinary" society" -- the birth of civil society -- impersonal institutions as in Weber's description of the modern state -- use of slaves/eunuchs to populate armies & bureaucracies reflects the difficulty of breaking kinship ties

the Assyrian & Achaemenid empires continued to rely on kinship & lineage for administration, recruiting from elite families, but "more developed bureaucratic systems recruited their personnel from a wider social range and depended on more broadly available literary and educational possibilities" -- importance of education in empowering different social groups to become significant political actors (soemething necessary, in Fukuyama's view at least, for a strong & successful modern state)

"A key issue is clearly the potential for state formations to reproduce themselves, in contrast to the potential of a particular dynasty with its retinues based upon personal loyalties and notions of honour, obligation, and reciprocity, to maintain itself in power over a number of generations" -- difference between governments and models of government; rule of law & legitimacy surpass & survive beyond the power of a single ruler (often based upon/justified by a particular ideology e.g. divine right, democracy)

"At higher levels of state development, [a bureaucratic elite that has a sense of its own function within the state or society] identifies with a particular set of ideological and symbolic narratives and can recruit and train its personnel into the institutional roles and behavioural patterns relevant to the maintenance and even expansion of these structures" -- thus allowing the state formation as a whole to survive/reproduce itself

successful examples of ^ in ancient history: the first Islamic caliphates; the Roman, Byzantine, Chinese & Ottoman states -- "some political formations evolved stable yet flexible structures sufficient to permit their survival over a long period, despite often major shifts in dynastic arrangements and the nature of the central authority itself"; but the "relative failures of the early Frankish kingdoms illustrate the fate of political formations that failed to generate such structures"

The Athenian Empire as a (relative) failure -- "In spite of its success in mobilising a vast resource catchment area, in the form of allies and dependent cities and territories, Athens remained remarkably jealous of its rights of citizenship ... the failure to expand citizenship and to create identities between centre and periphery reflected the failure to evolve an integrated imperial elite based on a broad tax base within the core territories. Athens was thus always parasitical in respect to its allied and subordinate territories, and this deprived it of the sort of structural flexibility that would have permitted it to survive the crisis of 405-404 B.C.E. and the defeat at Aegospotamoi. The failure to generate common identities within Athenian tributary territories vitiated Athenian strength at precisely the point at which it was most severely challenged"

parallel with the Aztec Empire when Spanish conquerors arrived, which was "not a centralised and ideologically unified organisation but rather a loose tribute federation in which different Native American nations with distinct identities had been forced to pay tribute to, and recognise the suzerainty of, the Aztec leadership in Tenochtitlan. Instead of the various domains of the Empire uniting against the foreign invaders, the Tlaxcalans and other former tributary tribes took advantage of the opportunity to join with the Spanish invades to destroy the Aztecs' power"

"the maintenance of ideological legitimacy and hegemony must accompany the maintenance of appropriate coercive potential ... [this] combination is central to the long-term survival of state systems"

"... the neo-Assyrian state of the tenth through the eighth centuries B.C.E. does appear to have been able to maintain an administrative apparatus that, although dependent upon a social and ethnic identity within the palace, was supported by the spread of a unifying religious belief in the cult of Assur. The taxation and tribute raising (and associated bureaucratic skills) that provided a stable basis for supporting this apparatus was integrated into a system of vassalage and dependency upon both the royal dynasty and the cult of Assur"

another example of a "remarkably successful" dynasty: late ancient/early medieval Persian Sasanid kingdom -- "ideological legitimacy and a bureaucratic administrative structure were successfully combined to hold in check powerful centrifugal tendencies, including competition among several equally powerful clans, for some four centuries" -- power depended on i) an ideological commitment by a Sasanid early aristocracy to the legitimacy of the dynasty & ii) the dynasty's willingness to protect (or at least not attack) the interests of that aristocracy

"It could be argued that it was only the need to attain ideological legitimacy within Islam that held the wider polity together, and successful religious-ideological opposition in Africa, Egypt and the Arabian peninsula led to its disintegration into multiple caliphates" -- the danger of power based on ideology esp. religion? -- a powerful force for state unity but also for challenging state unity

ii. State Success and Ideological Integration

"... it is clear from a cursory comparison of a number of ancient and medieval state formations that a central authority can survive for substantial periods simply through the manipulation of key ideological and symbolic elements in the cultural system of the social formation as a whole [as opposed to an integrated, ideologically rooted bureaucracy?]"

example: South Indian temple culture "and the attendant state structures" -- e.g. Chola empire/dynasty -- time of Brahmanism

"... states [e.g. India] may have ideological lives that are not necessarily tied to their actual political and institutional efficacy or power. Political ideologies and belief systems, once in existence, are sometimes well able to adapt and survive in conditions that have evolved significantly ... provided the contradictions between the two are not too extreme or insurmountable in terms of social praxis and psychology. Those that respond to long-term functional needs in human society provide the best examples and include religious systems ... such as Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. These systems did, to a greater or lesser degree, free themselves from both the political and the social and economic conditions that produced them (although they may at the same time constrain the direction of social-economic evolution within those societies)" -- an enduring issue: religion/ideology can be both reforming and reactionary, often in turn; source of political order <i>and</i> political decay

strength & importance of political ideologies: in many states, the power of an elite had originally depended upon the central ruler/state, but now held its own autonomous power; however, "the very idea of a centralised kingdom or state, together with the residual power of concepts such as honour or loyalty to a particular dynastic succession or to a set of constitutional arrangements, was enough to maintain at least a fictional unity of identity ... The Assyrian Empire in the late ninth century and the first half of the eighth century B.C.E. survived partly ... because of the strength of these symbolic and ideological relationships, in spite of political strife at the centre and the loss of certain more distant western territories"

other examples of state survival because of "the strength of ... symbolic and ideological relationships": The Holy Roman Empire, a base for Hapsburg rule until the seventeenth century "primarily through the ideological power of the Roman imperial ideal, rather than through the dynasty's coercive or organisational strength"; the Japanese shogunate, which "continue[d] to derive legitimacy from the concept of the semi-divine emperor's domination over all Japanese, long after the role of the imperial court in national politics had become insignificant" (important: strength of ideology even where it is no longer embedded in politics, becoming embedded as a kind of national culture);China, which became unified repeatedly after the original Qin and early Han unified empires -- "an ideal that survived multiple defeats and disintegrations of particular dynasties"

"... a crucial element in the longer-term success of a state formation is a degree of acceptance of that state as normatively desirable, especially by elites, but even by the broader populace from which it draws its resources" -- look at the acceptance of the "democracy" ideal today, and the importance of that -- the vast majority of the Western world, despite continual unhappiness with & distrust in their governments, want to hold them to their ideological promises rather than replace them with different forms of governance

"... the significance in the structuring of political relations of power and resource distribution of rules, 'law', and forms of normative behavioural patterns" -- key forces: traditionalism, rule of law, legitimacy

states, such as the Aztec Empire or the Mongol empires, which "survived only by virtue of their ability to coerce submission and the extraction of revenues and resources on a more or less continuous basis", did not survive for long -- common technique when an empire is clearly falling apart esp during war, to introduce maximum taxation in the hope of sustenance -- but does not work

"A good example of more lasting imperial power is provided by the case of Rome, in which a conquest state was able to evolve an ideological hegemony that in turn generated a consensual identity among the conquered territories"

"Although most states first evolved in the context of an imbalance between military coercion and cooperative participation, those that have been most successful have usually generated increasingly complex relationships of reciprocity, consensus, and interdependence with leading elements of conquered groups or previous political formations"

southern Indian state of Vijayanagar, where only a core region was the source of royal income & power over other regions was maintained largely by "connections of a ritual nature" -- "Royal rituals were centred on key religious centres and temples, through whose religious-ideological authority the rulers reinforced their legitimacy and claims to overlordship, in return for what they undertook to support such institutions through a variety of endowments, regular gifts in cash and in kind, grants of labour services, and so on"

but although the importance of religious ideology should not be underestimated, it is also important to remember that rulers were "generally quite aware of the process of religious-political manipulation necessary to the maintenance of their power and especially of the need to maintain control over resources in order to invest in this ritual system on a grand scale in order to continually legitimate their position" -- provoking the question: when rulers have a great deal invested in a legitimating religious or political ideal, do they "believe in it" themselves? Lenin and Trotsky are often assumed to have believed in their own systems; did Stalin? it seems obvious that authoritarian dictators who claim to be following democracy do not have faith in it as an ideal, but do Western leaders? do American presidents always revere the Constitution? etc.

rituals, if defined as "specific sets of social practices that express the legitimacy and belief system underpinning elite and central authority", were a key element inallpre-capitalist social formations

although religion was often infused into state formation, the specific impact of Hinduism (as argued by Fukuyama, too) was especially notable -- "If we assume that states provide both centralised authority and, more important, normative rules for legal, social and economic relationships, then it becomes clear that in the Hindu context these characteristics of state organisation are already present in the internal order of religious and social life"

importance of conversion when conquering new territory for both Christian and Islamic empires

different elites may have different ideological stories/explanations about why they co-operate with the state; different "social memories"; "... these legitimating narratives for various groups need to overlap and interpenetrate in a way that creates a network of ties that supports the authority of the state ... such narratives serve not only to differentiate particular sets of individuals or subgroups ... but at the same time to offer a source of common ideas and shared identities when the group as a whole is confronted with something external"

iii. States and Elites

important questions to ask about any imperial state: nature of power-relations -- how autonomous were elite groups/institutions (e.g. a church) and did the state depend on them? how far could religious/social/economic traditions (inc. & esp. rule of law) limit the power of a ruler and the state itself? to what extent were kinship ties broken; did an impersonal bureaucracy exist?

iv. States, Empires, and Complexity

v. History and the Evolution of Imperial Forms

[anexercisebook-blog1]

fiction submission

"she-clowns" etc

alt. hist. fiction

"urban themed" fiction

short stories in general

[anexercisebook-blog1]

great gatsby quotes

After half an hour, the sun shone again, and the grocer’s automobile rounded Gatsby’s drive with the raw material for his servants’ dinner — I felt sure he wouldn’t eat a spoonful. A maid began opening the upper windows of his house, appeared momentarily in each, and, leaning from a large central bay, spat meditatively into the garden. It was time I went back. While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with gusts of emotion. But in the new silence I felt that silence had fallen within the house too.

I went in — after making every possible noise in the kitchen, short of pushing over the stove — but I don’t believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if some question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears, and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.

“Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.

“It’s stopped raining.”

“Has it?” When he realized what I was talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to Daisy. “What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining.”

“I’m glad, Jay.” Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.

“I want you and Daisy to come over to my house,” he said, “I’d like to show her around.”

*

He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.

*

He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.

*

"I feel far away from her," he said. "It's hard to make her understand."

"You mean about the dance?"

"The dance?" He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. "Old sport, the dance is unimportant."

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: "I never loved you." After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house--just as if it were five years ago.

"And she doesn't understand," he said. "She used to be able to understand. We'd sit for hours----"

He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.

"I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't repeat the past."

"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

"I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She'll see."

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.

*

“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”

*

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of ——” I hesitated.

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money — that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. . . . high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl. . . .

*

Gatsby’s eyes floated toward her. “Ah,” she cried, “you look so cool.”

Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.

“You always look so cool,” she repeated.

She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time ago.

“You resemble the advertisement of the man,” she went on innocently. “You know the advertisement of the man ——”

[anexercisebook-blog1]

love & grief

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD:

"The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. ... It was invincably cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves. Proud floodlights were trained on some of the lawns, on some of the neat front doors and on the hips of some of the berthed, ice-cream coloured automobiles. A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place. Except for the whisk of his shoes on the asphalt and the rush of his own breath, it was so quiet that he could hear the sounds of television in the dozing rooms behind the leaves - a blurred comedian's shout followed by dim, spastic waves of laughter and applause, and then the striking-up of a band. Even when he veered from the pavement, cut across someone's back yard and plunged into the down-sloping woods, intent on a madman's shortcut to Revolutionary Road, even then there was no escape: the house lights beamed and stumbled happily along with him among the twigs that whipped his face, and once when he lost his footing and fell scrabbling down a rocky ravine, he came up with a child's enameled tin beach bucket in his hand."

"As he clambered out onto asphalt again at the base of the Hill he allowed his dizzy, jogging mind to indulge in a cruel delusion: it had all been a nightmare; he would round this next bend and see the lights blazing in his own house; he would run inside and find her at the ironing board, or curled up on the sofa with a magazine ('What's the matter, Frank? Your pants are all muddy! Of course I'm all right ...'). But then he saw the house - really saw it - long and milk-white in the moonlight, with black windows, the only darkened house on the road."

"How could she be dead when the house was alive with the sound of her and the sense of her? Even when he had finished the cleaning, when there was nothing to do but walk around and turn on lights and turn them off again, even then her presence was everywhere, as real as the scent of her dresses in the bedroom closet."

"How could a man be courageous when he wasn't even alive? Because that was the whole point; that was the way he'd seemed when he came to call that March afternoon: a walking, talking, smiling, lifeless man."

"He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn't try to stop for a while, until he realised he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unecessary shudders. Then, ashamed of himself, he bent over and carefully set his drink on the grass, got out his handkerchief and blew his nose. The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted: let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs, or you started telling about the Wheelers with a sad, sentimental smile and saying Frank was courageous, and then what the hell did you have left?"

*

THE GREAT GATSBY:

"At first I couldn't find the source of the high, groaning words that echoed clamorously through the bare garage - then I saw Wilson standing on the raised threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding to the doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a low voice and attempting, from time to time, to lay a hand on his shoulder, but Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly from the swinging light to the laden table by the wall, and then jerk back to the light again, and he gave out incessantly his high, horrible call"

[anexercisebook-blog1]

unconditional & conditional love/love & imperfection

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD:

"'I love you when you're nice,' she'd told him once, before they were married, and it had made him furious. 'Don't say that. Christ's sake, you don't "love" people when they're "nice". Don't you see that's the same as saying, "What's in it for me?" Look.' (They were standing on Sixth Avenue in the middle of the night, and he was holding her at arm's length, his hands placed firmly on either side of the warm rib cage inside her polo coat.) 'Look. You either love me or you don't, and you're going to have to make up your mind.'"

"It had been easy to decide in favour of love on Bethune Street, in favour of walking proud and naked on the grass rug of an apartment that caught the morning sun among its makeshift chairs, its French travel posters and its bookcase made of packing-crate slats - an apartment where half the fun of having an affair was that it was just like being married, and where later, after a trip to City Hall and back, after a ceremonial collecting of the other two keys from the other two men, half the fun of being married was that it was just like having an affair."

"'Oh, all right, sure,' he conceded. 'Maybe they did seem romantic and everything; they probably seemed very dazzling and glamourous and all that. The point is, I don't mean that. I mean love.' 'So do I. I did love them.' Her grave silence following this statement, as she fastened the clasp of the jewellery box, was so prolonged that he thought she had finished with the subject. He decided he was finished with it anyway, at least for the time being. It was too hot a night to have an argument. But it turned out that she was only thinking it over, preparing her next words with great care to make sure they would say exactly what she meant. When she began to speak at last she looked so much like the little girl in the photographs that he was ashamed of himself. 'I loved their clothes,' she said. 'I loved the way they talked. I loved to hear them tell about their lives.' And there was nothing for him to do but take her in his arms, full of pity for the meagreness of her treasure and full of a reverent, silent promise, soon to be broken, that he would never again disparage it."

"Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other's strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on."

"He found it hard to keep his voice from thickening into a sentimental husk as he began to read aloud, with their two heads pressed close to his ribs on either side and their thin legs lying straight out on the sofa cushions, warm against his own. They knew what forgiveness was; they were willing to take him for better or worse; they loved him. Why couldn't April realise how simple and necessary it was to love? Why did she have to complicate everything?"

"Jennifer's voice was the loudest and April's was the only one in tune when they took the high note - 'Happy birth-day, dear Dad-dy ... ' but Michael was doing the best he could, and his was the widest smile."

"now he was allowing his wife to ask forgiveness, and at the same time, with a cold eye, he was discovering that she wasn't really very much to look at: she was too old and too tall and too intense."

'That man,' he said again, 'is insane. Do you know what the definition of insanity is?' 'No. Do you?' 'Yes. It's the inability to relate to another human being. It's the inability to love.' She began to laugh. Her head went back, the two perfect rows of her teeth sprang forth, and her eyes were brilliantly narrowed as peal after peal of her laughter rang in the room. 'The in;' she said; 'the in; inabil; the inability to - ' She was hysterical."

'So now I'm crazy because I don't love you - right? Is that the point?' 'No. Wrong. You're not crazy, and you do love me; that's the point.'

"... your cowardly self-delusions about 'love' when you know as well as I do that there's never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other's weakness - that's why. That's why I couldn't stop laughing today when you said that about the Inabiilty to Love, and that's why I can't stand to let you touch me, and that's why I'll never again believe in anything you think, let alone in anything you say ..."

[anexercisebook-blog1]

love & beauty

GREAT EXPECTATIONS:

"In the interval, Miss Havisham, in a fantastic way, had put some of the most beautiful jewels from the dressing-table into Estella's hair, and about her bosom and arms; and I saw even my guardian look at her from under his thick eyebrows, and raise them a little, when her loveliness was before him, with those rich flushes of glitter and colour in it."

"In her furred travelling-dress, Estella seemed more delicately beautiful than she had ever seemed yet, even in my eyes. Her manner was more willing than she had cared to let it be to me before, and I thought I saw Miss Havisham's influence in the change."

"Estella looked at her with perfect composure, and again looked down at the fire. Her graceful figure and her beautiful face expressed a self-possessed indifference to the wild heat of the other, that was almost cruel."

[anexercisebook-blog1]

love & jealousy (under construction)

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE:

"- worse even than my misery over Simon, which I was more or less used to - was the gradual realisation that I had been utterly in the wrong with Rose. I saw that the main reason for my outburst hadn't been noble anxiety about Simon's happiness but sheer, blazing jealousy."

"It is one of her theories that a woman must never be jealous, never try to hold a man against his will."

*

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD:

'No,' she said. 'I don't mean why did you have the girl; I mean why did you tell me about it? What's the point? Is it supposed to make me jealous, or something? Is it supposed to make me fall in love with you, or back into bed with you, or what? I mean what am I supposed to say?' He looked at her, feeling his face blush and twitch into an embarrassed simper that he tried, unsuccessfully, to make over into the psychiatrist smile. 'Why don't you say what you feel?' She seemed to think this over for a few seconds, and then she shrugged. 'I have. I don't feel anything.' 'In other words you don't care what I do or who I go to bed with or anything. Right?' 'No; I guess that's right; I don't.' 'But I want you to care!' 'I know you do. And I suppose I would, if I loved you; but you see I don't. I don't love you and I never really have.'

[anexercisebook-blog1]

unrequited love (under construction)

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE:

"And I must set it down to-day so that I shall have it for ever, intact and lovely, untouched by the sadness that is coming - for of course it is coming; my brain tells me that."

"All I can recall is happiness, happiness in my mind and in my heart and flowing through my whole body, happiness like the warm cloak of sunlight that fell round me on the tower."

"all during the drive home I found it quite easy to carry on a casual conversation; it was as if my real feelings were down fathoms deep in my mind and what we said was just a feathery surface spray."

"that he belonged to Rose, that I could never win him from her even if I were wicked enough to try, which I never would be."

"Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return - that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. For a moment I felt that I had discovered a great truth."

"how bitter it is to read that last line I wrote little over three weeks ago - now when I cannot even remember what happiness feels like!" ... "the dead, flat, watching-myself feeling which has come this morning for the first time. It is utterly dreary but better than acute wretchedness."

"a game of follow-the-leader we are all playing"

"it wasn't only the wonderful luxury of being in love that had been buoying me up: deep down, in some vague mixed way, I had been letting myself hope that he didn't really care for her, that it was me he loved and that kissing me would have made him realise it."

"Wakings are the worst times - almost before my eyes are open a great weight seems to roll onto my heart."

"I don't think I could bring myself to describe any of them in detail because, though they are wonderful at the time, they give me a flat, sick, ashamed feeling to look back on. And they are like a drug, one needs them oftener and oftener and has to make them more and more exciting - until at last one's imagination won't work at all."

"surely one wants to write about the person one is in love with? Why, I even write Simon's name on scraps of paper! (And then get fits of nerves that I haven't really torn them up.)"

"It was the funny little girl he had liked - the comic child playing at Midsummer rites; she was the one he had kissed."

"And yet as my eyes turned to Stephen facing the sunrise, from Simon in the darkness of my mind, it was as if Simon's had been the living face and Stephen's the one I was imagining - or a photograph, a painting, something beautiful but not really alive for me. My whole heart was so full of Simon that even my pity for Stephen wasn't quite real - it was only something I felt I ought to feel, more from my head than from my heart. And I knew I ought to pity him all the more because I could pity him so little."

"Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can."

"Only half a page left now. Shall I fill it with 'I love you, I love you' - like father's page of cats on the mat? No. Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper."

"A mist is rolling over the fields. Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad? There was mist on Midsummer Eve, mist when we drove into the dawn. He said he would come back. Only the margin to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you."

*

GREAT EXPECTATIONS:

"We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed right. Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy to-day and somebody else to-morrow; she would have derived only pain, and no pleasure, from giving me pain; she would far rather have wounded her own breast than mine. How could it be, then, that I did not like her much the better of the two? 'Biddy,' said I, when we were walking homeward, 'I wish you could put me right.' 'I wish I could!' said Biddy. 'If I could only get myself to fall in love with you, - you don't mind me speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?' 'Oh dear, not at all!' said Biddy. 'Don't mind me.' 'If I could only get myself to do it, that would be the thing for me.' 'But you never will, you see,' said Biddy."

"There appeared upon the scene - say at the races, or the public balls, or anywhere else you like - a certain man, who made love to Miss Havisham. I never saw him, but I have heard my father mention that he was a showy man, and the kind of man for the purpose. But that he was not to be, without ignorance or prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman, my father most strongly asseverates; because it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner." ... "This man pursued Miss Havisham closely, and professed to be devoted to her. I believe she had not shown much susceptibility up to that time; but all the susceptibility came out then, and she passionately loved him. There is no doubt that she perfectly idolised him. He practised on her affection in that systematic way, that he got great sums of money from her, and he induced her to buy her brother out of a share in the brewery at an immense price, on the plea that when he was her husband he must hold and manage it all." ... "she was too haughty and too much in love to be advised by any one" ... "he warned her that she was doing too much for this man, and was placing herself too unreservedly in his power"

"The marriage day was fixed, the wedding dresses were bought, the wedding tour was planned out, the wedding guests were invited. The day came, but not the bridegroom. He wrote her a letter -" ... "At the hour and minute at which she afterwards stopped all the clocks." ... "she laid the whole place waste, as you have seen it, and she has never since looked upon the light of day"

"'Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?' 'Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham.' She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as she sat in the chair. 'Love her, love her, love her! How does she use you?' Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all) she repeated, 'Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces, - and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper, - love her, love her, love her!' Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round my neck swell with the vehemence that possessed her. 'Here me, Pip! I adopted her, to be loved. I bred her and educated her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her!' She said the word often enough, and there could be no doubt that she meant to say it; but if the often repeated word had been hate instead of love - despair - revenge - dire death - it could not have sounded from her lips more like a curse.

'I'll tell you,' said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, 'what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter - as I did!'

When she came to that, and to a wild cry that followed that, I caught her round the waist. For she rose up in the chair, in her shroud of a dress, and struck at the air as if she would as soon have struck herself against the wall and fallen dead."

"Far into the night, Miss Havisham's words, 'Love her, love her, love her!' sounded in my ears. I adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, 'I love her, I love her, I love her!' hundreds of times."

"Ah me! I thought these were high and great emotions."

"its having been so strongly rooted in the breast of a boy whom nature and circumstances made so romantic, renders it very serious. Think of her bringing-up, and think of Miss Havisham. Think of what she is herself (now I am repulsive and you abominate me). This may lead to miserable things."

"My appetite vanished instantly, and I knew no peace or rest until the day arrived."

"While my mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence of the contrast between the jail and her." ... "I beat the prison dust off my feet as I sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's conservatory, when I saw her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me. What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?"

"Yet the room was all in all to me, Estella being in it. I thought that with her I could have been happy there for life. (I was not at all happy there at the time, observe, and I knew it well.)"

"Her reverting to this tone as if our association were forced upon us, and we were mere puppets, gave me pain; but everything in our intercourse did give me pain. Whatever her tone with me happened to be, I could put no trust in it, and build no hope on it; and yet I went on against trust and against hope. Why repeat it a thousand times? So it always was."

"she held my heart in her hand because she wilfully chose to do it, and not because it would have wrung any tenderness in her to crush it and throw it away."

"And still I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy with her, but always miserable."

"O the many, many nights and days through which the unquiet spirit within me haunted that house when Estella lived there! Let my body be where it would, my spirit was always wandering, wandering, wandering, about that house."

"I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death."

"'Pip, Pip,' she said one evening, coming to such a check, when we sat apart at a darkening window of the house in Richmond; 'will you never take warning?' 'Of what?' 'Of me.' 'Warning not to be attracted by you, do you mean, Estella?' 'Do I mean! If you don't know what I mean, you are blind.'"

"But when we sat by her flickering fire at night, she was most weird; for then, keeping Estella's hand drawn through her arm and clutched in her own hand, she extorted from her, by dint of referring back to what Estella had told her in her regular letters, the names and conditions of the men whom she had fascinated; and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity of a mind mortally hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her crutch stick, and her chin on that, and her wan bright eyes glaring at me, a very sceptre."

"that Estella was set to wreak Miss Havisham's revenge on men, and that she was not to be given to me until she had gratified it for a term. I saw in this, a reason for her being beforehand assigned to me. Sending her out to attract and torment and do mischief, Miss Havisham sent her with the malicious assurance that she was beyond the reach of all admirers, and that all who staked upon that cast were secured to lose. I saw in this that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while the prize was reserved for me. In a word, I saw in this Miss Havisham as I had her then and there before my eyes, and always had had her before my eyes; and I saw in this, the distinct shadow of the darkened and unhealthy house in which her life was hidden from the sun."

"'I begin to think,' said Estella, in a musing way, after another moment of calm wonder, 'that I almost understand how this comes about. If you had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as the daylight by which she had never once seen your face, - if you had done that, and then, for a purpose had wanted her to understand the daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and angry?'

Miss Havisham, with her head in her hands, sat making a low moaning, and swaying herself on her chair, but gave no answer.

'Or,' said Estella, '- which is a nearer case, - if you had taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her; - if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry?'

Miss Havisham sat listening (or it seemed so, for I could not see her face), but still made no answer.

'So,' said Estella, 'I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.'"

"'Do you want me, then,' said Estella, turning suddenly with a fixed and serious, if not angry, look, 'to deceive and entrap you?'

'Do you deceive and trap him, Estella?'

'Yes, and many others, - all of them but you.'"

"a model with a mechanical heart to practise on when no other practice was at hand"

"'Sally, she really is upstairs alonger me, now, and I can't get rid of her. She's all in white,' he says, 'wi' white flowers in her hair, and she's awful mad, and she's got a shroud hanging over her arm, and she says she'll put it on me at five in the morning.'" ... "'I don't know how she's there,' says Arthur, shivering dreadful with the horrors, 'but she's standing in the corner at the foot of the bed, awful mad. And over where her heart's broke - you broke it! - there's drops of blood.'" ... "'Why look at her!' he cries out. 'She's a shaking the shroud at me! Don't you see her? Look at her eyes! Ain't it awful to see her so mad?' Next he cries, 'She'll put it on me, and then I'm done for! Take it away from her, take it away!' And then he catched hold of us, and kep on a talking to her, and answering of her, till I half believed I see her myself." ... "'Here she is! She's got the shroud again. She's unfolding it. She's coming out of the corner. She's coming to the bed. Hold me, both on you - one of each side - don't let her touch me with it. Hah! she missed me that time. Don't let her throw it over my shoulders. Don't let her lift me up to get it round me. She's lifting me up. Keep me down!' Then he lifted himself up hard, and was dead."

"'Who am I,' cried Miss Havisham, striking her stick upon the floor and flashing into wrath so suddenly that Estella glanced up at her in surprise, - 'who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind?'"

"'It seems,' said Estella, very calmly, 'that there are sentiments, fancies - I don't know how to call them, - which I am not able to comprehend. When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a form of words; but nothing more. You address nothing in my breast, you touch nothing there. I don't care for what you say at all. I have tried to warn you of this; now, have I not?'"

"'Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since -- on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!'

In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got these broken words out of myself, I don't know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from an inward wound, and gushed out."

"while Estella looked at me merely with incredulous wonder, the spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of pity and remorse."

"Why I hoarded up this last wretched little rag of the robe of hope that was rent and given to the winds, how do I know? Why did you who read this, commit that not dissimilar inconsistency of your own last year, last month, last week?"

"'O!" she cried, despairingly. 'What have I done! What have I done!'

'If you mean, Miss Havisham, what have you done to injure me, let me answer. Very little. I should have loved her under any  circumstances. - Is she married?'

'Yes.'  

It was a needless question, for a new desolation in the desolate house had told me so.   

'What have I done! What have I done!' She wrung her hands, and crushed her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. 'What have I done!'   

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown  diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?

'Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!' And so again, twenty, fifty times over, What had she done!"

"And if he asked me why I wanted it, and why I thought I had any right to it, I would tell him, little as he cared for such poor dreams, that I had loved Estella dearly and long, and that although I had lost her, and must live a bereaved life, whatever concerned her was still nearer and dearer to me than anything else in the world."

"I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her."

*

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD:

"Stumbling down the wooden steps and out into the darkness, grinding the pebbles fiercely under his heels, he felt all the forces of the plausible, the predictable and the ordinary envelop him like ropes. Nothing was going to happen; and the hell with her. Why wasn't she at home where she belonged? Why couldn't she go to Europe or disappear or die? The hell with this aching, suffering, callow, half-assed delusion that he was in 'love' with her. The hell with 'love' anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assd emotion in the world."

"She didn't really want to talk; not to him, anyway. All she wanted was to sound off, to make herself feel better by playing at being wistful and jaded, and she had elected him as her audience."

"'It's not that. Honestly. It's just that I don't know who you are.' There was a silence. 'Don't talk riddles,' he whispered. 'I'm not. I really don't know who you are.' If he couldn't see her face, at least he could touch it. He did so with a blind man's delicacy, drawing his fingertips from her temple down into the hollow of her cheek. 'And even if I did,' she said, 'I'm afraid it wouldn't help, because you see I don't know who I am, either.'"

*

ROMEO AND JULIET:

BENVOLIO

Good-morrow, cousin.

ROMEO

Is the day so young?

BENVOLIO

But new struck nine.

ROMEO

Ay me! sad hours seem long. Was that my father that went hence so fast?

BENVOLIO

It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?

ROMEO

Not having that, which, having, makes them short.

BENVOLIO

In love?

ROMEO

Out--

BENVOLIO

Of love?

ROMEO

Out of her favour, where I am in love.

BENVOLIO

Alas, that love, so gentle in his view, Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!

ROMEO

Alas, that love, whose view is muffled still, Should, without eyes, see pathways to his will! Where shall we dine? O me! What fray was here? Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all. Here's much to do with hate, but more with love. Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness! serious vanity! Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health! Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this. Dost thou not laugh?

BENVOLIO

No, coz, I rather weep.

ROMEO

Good heart, at what?

BENVOLIO

At thy good heart's oppression.

ROMEO

Why, such is love's transgression. Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast, Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest With more of thine: this love that thou hast shown Doth add more grief to too much of mine own. Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes; Being vex'd a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears: What is it else? a madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet. Farewell, my coz.

BENVOLIO

Soft! I will go along; An if you leave me so, you do me wrong.

ROMEO

Tut, I have lost myself; I am not here; This is not Romeo, he's some other where.

BENVOLIO

Tell me in sadness, who is that you love.

ROMEO

What, shall I groan and tell thee?

BENVOLIO

Groan! why, no. But sadly tell me who.

ROMEO

Bid a sick man in sadness make his will: Ah, word ill urged to one that is so ill! In sadness, cousin, I do love a woman.

BENVOLIO

I aim'd so near, when I supposed you loved.

ROMEO

A right good mark-man! And she's fair I love.

BENVOLIO

A right fair mark, fair coz, is soonest hit.

ROMEO

Well, in that hit you miss: she'll not be hit With Cupid's arrow; she hath Dian's wit; And, in strong proof of chastity well arm'd, From love's weak childish bow she lives unharm'd. She will not stay the siege of loving terms, Nor bide the encounter of assailing eyes, Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold: O, she is rich in beauty, only poor, That when she dies with beauty dies her store.

BENVOLIO

Then she hath sworn that she will still live chaste?

ROMEO

She hath, and in that sparing makes huge waste, For beauty starved with her severity Cuts beauty off from all posterity. She is too fair, too wise, wisely too fair, To merit bliss by making me despair: She hath forsworn to love, and in that vow Do I live dead that live to tell it now.

BENVOLIO

Be ruled by me, forget to think of her.

ROMEO

O, teach me how I should forget to think.

BENVOLIO

By giving liberty unto thine eyes; Examine other beauties.

ROMEO

'Tis the way To call hers exquisite, in question more: These happy masks that kiss fair ladies' brows Being black put us in mind they hide the fair; He that is strucken blind cannot forget The precious treasure of his eyesight lost: Show me a mistress that is passing fair, What doth her beauty serve, but as a note Where I may read who pass'd that passing fair? Farewell: thou canst not teach me to forget.

*

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM:

DEMETRIUS

I love thee not, therefore pursue me not. Where is Lysander and fair Hermia? The one I'll slay, the other slayeth me. Thou told'st me they were stolen unto this wood; And here am I, and wode within this wood, Because I cannot meet my Hermia. Hence, get thee gone, and follow me no more.

HELENA

You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant; But yet you draw not iron, for my heart Is true as steel: leave you your power to draw, And I shall have no power to follow you.

DEMETRIUS 

Do I entice you? do I speak you fair? Or, rather, do I not in plainest truth Tell you, I do not, nor I cannot love you?

HELENA 

And even for that do I love you the more. I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, The more you beat me, I will fawn on you: Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me, Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave, Unworthy as I am, to follow you. What worser place can I beg in your love,-- And yet a place of high respect with me,-- Than to be used as you use your dog?

DEMETRIUS

Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit; For I am sick when I do look on thee.

HELENA 

And I am sick when I look not on you.

DEMETRIUS 

You do impeach your modesty too much, To leave the city and commit yourself Into the hands of one that loves you not; To trust the opportunity of night And the ill counsel of a desert place With the rich worth of your virginity.

HELENA 

Your virtue is my privilege: for that It is not night when I do see your face, Therefore I think I am not in the night; Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company, For you in my respect are all the world: Then how can it be said I am alone, When all the world is here to look on me?

DEMETRIUS 

I'll run from thee and hide me in the brakes, And leave thee to the mercy of wild beasts.

HELENA 

The wildest hath not such a heart as you. Run when you will, the story shall be changed: Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase; The dove pursues the griffin; the mild hind Makes speed to catch the tiger; bootless speed, When cowardice pursues and valour flies.

DEMETRIUS

 I will not stay thy questions; let me go: Or, if thou follow me, do not believe But I shall do thee mischief in the wood.

HELENA 

Ay, in the temple, in the town, the field, You do me mischief. Fie, Demetrius! Your wrongs do set a scandal on my sex: We cannot fight for love, as men may do; We should be wood and were not made to woo.

Exit DEMETRIUS

I'll follow thee and make a heaven of hell, To die upon the hand I love so well.

[anexercisebook-blog1]

love & sexuality/desire (under construction)

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED:

"Because her sex was the palpable difference between the familiar and the strange, it seemed to fill the space between us, so that I felt her to be especially female, as I had felt of no woman before."

"as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me."

"not, as had happened to her once or twice before with sentimental and uncertain boys, but with a passion that disclosed the corner of something like it in her. Their passion frightened her, and she came back from the confessional one day determined to put an end to it."

*

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE:

"He looked at me, right into my eyes. That queer, veiled expression in his - that I fear I used to call his daft look - was suddenly not there; there seemed to be a light in them and yet I have never seen them look so dark. And they were so direct that it was more like being touched than being looked at. It only lasted a second, but for that second he was quite a different person - much more interesting, even a little bit exciting."

"being looked at like that makes a person feel dizzy"

[anexercisebook-blog1]

love & social status/marriage/gender roles

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED:

"Lord Marchmain's mistress, therefore, found me with a multitude of conflicting expectations about her, all of which were, for the moment, disappointed by her appearance. She was not a voluptuous Tolouse-Lautrec odalisque; she was not a 'little bit of fluff'; she was a middle-aged, well-preserved, well-dressed, well-mannered woman such as I had seen in countless public places and occasionally met. Nor did she seem marked by any social stigma."

"She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and, saying 'I must read that, too, when I've the time', replace it, and continue the search."

"His social position was unique; it had an air of mystery, even of crime, about it; people said Rex went about armed."

"Certainly the fact of his being Brenda Champion's property sharpened Julia's appetite for Rex."

"He knew of Julia; she was by all accounts top débutante, a suitable prize."

"And then, without in the least expecting it, she suddenly found herself in love. It came to her, this disturbing and unsought revelation, one evening in May, when Rex had told her he would be busy at the House, and, driving by chance down Charles Street, she saw him leaving what she knew to be Brenda Champion's house. She was so hurt and angry that she could barely keep up appearances through dinner; as soon as she could, she went home and cried bitterly for ten minutes"

'What do you expect?' he said. 'What right have you to ask so much, when you give so little?'

"In fact, poor Rex found he'd married an outcast, which was exactly the opposite of all he'd wanted."

"He simply wasn't all there. He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole."

"She seemed to say: 'Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?'"

'I was glad when I found Celia was unfaithful,' I said. 'I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.' 'Is she? Do you? I'm glad. I don't like her either. Why did you marry her?' 'Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she's the ideal wife for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian.' 'You loved him, didn't you?' 'Oh, yes. He was the forerunner.' Julia understood.

"I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure."

'But we've got our happiness in spite of them; here and now, we've taken possession of it. They can't hurt us, can they?' 'Not tonight; not now.' 'Not for how many nights?'

"a woman of strict Catholic principle fortified by the prejudices of the middle class"

*

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE:

'If you're really taken with the idea of selling yourself, you'd better choose a wealthy man and marry him respectably.'

"The idea has, of course, occurred to Rose, but she has always hoped that the man would be handsome, romantic and loveable into the bargain. I suppose it was her sheer despair of ever meeting any marriageable men at all, even hideous, poverty-stricken ones, that made her suddenly burst into tears."

"It is a pity that Simon is the heir, because Rose thinks the beard is disgusting; but perhaps we can get it off. Am I really admitting that my sister is determined to marry a man she has only seen once and doesn't much like the look of? It is half real and half pretence - and I have an idea that it is a game most girls play when they meet any eligible young men."

"there is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love." ... "I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage."

"Rose had gone self-conscious when she saw the Cottons - I could tell that by the way she was sailing down, graceful but affected."

'I could marry the Devil himself if he had some money,' said Rose.

'Men don't really mind your showing you like them when you do, but they run a mile from obvious fascination - that's what it was, of course, all the challenging and head-tossing, and all directed at Simon in the crudest way.'

'Don't blame her too much - the first time girls feel their power it often takes them like that.'

*

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD:

'Don't you know? You're the most valuable and wonderful thing in the world. You're a man.'

"He had taken command of the universe because he was a man, and because the marvellous creature who opened and moved for him, tender and strong, was a woman."

"'I like your girl, Wheeler,' he announced at last. 'I get the feeling she's female. You know what the difference between female and feminine is? Huh? Well, here's a hint: a feminine woman never laughs out loud and always shaves her armpits. Old Helen in there is feminine as hell. I've only met about half a dozen females in my life, and I think you got one of them here. Course, come to think of it, that figures. I get the feeling you're male. There aren't too many males around, either.'"

"And so he freed himself to concentrate on the refinements of his role. He was particularly careful never to mention his day at the office or confess to being tired after the train, he assumed a quiet, almost Continental air of mastery in dealing with waiters and gas station attendants, he salted his after-theatre critiques with obscure literary references - all to demonstrate that a man condemned to a life at Knox could still be interesting ('You're the most interesting person I've ever met'); he enthusiastically romped with the children, disdainfully mowed the lawn in record time and once spent the whole of a midnight's drive in an impersonation of Eddie Cantor singing 'That's the Kind of a Baby for Me' because it made her laugh - all to demonstrate that a man confronted with this bleakest and most unnatural of conjugal problems, a wife unwilling to bear his child, could still be nice ('I love you when you're nice')."

"and for her to spend [each day] imprisoned in the reality of their home."

'You know. The psychological thing behind this abortion business. Is that what woman are supposed to be expressing when they don't want to have children? That they're not really women, or don't want to be women, or something?'

[anexercisebook-blog1]

love & age/the passage of time (under construction)

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED:

"as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever say or do or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster."

"I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a tiny, priggish, warning voice in my ear which in the tones of Collins told me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognised apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city"

'I feel so old.' 'I feel middle-aged. That is infinitely worse. I believe we have had all the fun we can expect here.'

"There was a change in both of us. We had lost the sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down."

"With Sebastian it was different. His year of anarchy had filled a deep, interior need of his, the escape from reality, and as he found himself increasingly hemmed in, where he once felt himself free, he became at times listless and morose, even with me."

"He did not fail in love, but he lost his joy of it, for I was no longer part of his solitude. As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him." ... "He was sick at heart somewhere, I did not know how, and I grieved for him, unable to help."

"but it was not as it had been; there was mid-winter in Sebastian's heart"

'Bless you, Charles. There aren't many evenings left to us.'

"So we started that day exactly where we left off two years ago, with my wife in tears."

'You didn't wonder if I should have fallen in love with someone else in the meantime?' 'No. Have you?' 'You know I haven't. Have you?' 'No. I'm not in love.'

"'No, Charles, not yet. Perhaps never. I don't know. I don't know if I want love.'

Then something, some surviving ghost from those dead ten years - for one cannot die, even for a little, without some loss - made me say, 'Love? I'm not asking for love.' 'Oh yes, Charles, you are,' she said, and putting up her hand gently stroked my cheek; then shut her door."

"'She never loved him, you know, as we do.' 'Do'. The word reproached me; there was no past tense in Cordelia's verb 'to love'."

"I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days."

'Sometimes,' said Julia, 'I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.'

"then and always, however she spoke to me, in half sentences, single words, stock phrases of contemporary jargon, in scarcely perceptible movements of eyes or lips or hands, however inexpressible her thought, however quick and far it had glanced from the matter in hand, however deep it had plunged, as it often did, straight from the surface to the depths, I knew; even on that day when I still stood on the extreme verge of love, I knew what she meant."

*

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD:

"Nowhere in these plans had he foreseen the weight and shock of reality; nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ("Wouldn't you like to be loved by me?"), and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell."

(in the early stages of their relationship) "and a week after that, almost to the day, she was lying miraculously nude beside him in the first blue light of day on Bethune Street, drawing her delicate forefinger down his face from brow to chin and whispering: 'It's true, Frank. I mean it. You're the most interesting person I've ever met.'"

"And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged."

"What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you'd started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying 'I'm sorry, of course you're right,' and 'Whatever you think is best,' and 'You're the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world,' and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at The Petrified Forest, or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums - earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and 'We've got to be together in this thing' whne you meant the very opposite; then you were breathing gasoline as if it were flowers and abandoning yourself to a delirium of love under the weight of a clumsy, grunting, red-faced man you didn't even like - Shep Campbell! - and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn't even know who you were. And how could anyone else be blamed for that?"

[anexercisebook-blog1]

love & religion (under construction)

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED:

"I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead."

"I caught him with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."

'You must understand that Beryl is a woman of strict Catholic principle fortified by the prejudices of the middle class. I couldn't possibly bring her here. It is a matter of indifference whether you choose to live in sin with Rex or Charles or both - I have always avoided enquiry into the details of your menage - but in no case would Beryl consent to be your guest.'

'"Living in sin"; not just doing wrong, as I did when I went to America; doing wrong, knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting ... Living in sin, with sin, always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world.'

'I didn't know till today. Oh, my dear, if you could only understand. Then I could bear to part, or bear it better. I should say my heart was breaking, if I believed in broken hearts. I can't marry you, Charles; I can't be with you ever again.'

"'Now,' said the priest, 'I know you are sorry for all the sins of your life, aren't you? Make a sign, if you can. You're sorry, aren't you?' But there was no sign. 'Try and remember your sins; tell God you are sorry. I am going to give you absolution. While I am giving it, tell God you are sorry you have offended him.' He began to speak in Latin. I recognized the words 'ego te absolvo in nomine Patris...' and saw the priest make the sign of the cross. Then I knelt, too, and prayed: 'O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such thing as sin,' and the man on the bed opened his eyes and gave a sigh, the sort of sigh I had imagined people made at the moment of death, but his eyes moved so that we knew there was still life in him.

I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I knew, for a sign. It seemed so small a thing that was asked, the bare acknowledgement of a present, a nod in the crowd. I prayed more simply; 'God forgive him his sins' and 'Please God, make him accept your forgiveness.'

So small a thing to ask.

The priest took the little silver box from his pocket and spoke again in Latin, touching the dying man with an oil wad; he finished what he had to do, put away the box and gave the final blessing. Suddenly Lord Marchmain moved his hand to his forehead; I thought he had felt the touch of the chrism and was wiping it away. 'O God,' I prayed, 'don't let him do that.' But there was no need for fear; the hand moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross. Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom."

"'Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.'

'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.'"

'What will you do?' 'Just go on - alone. How can I tell what I shall do? You know the whole of me. You know I'm not one for a life of mourning. I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from his mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without him. One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable - like things in the school-room, so bad they were unpunishable, that only mummy could deal with - the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's. Why should I be allowed to understand that, and not you, Charles? It may be because of mummy, nanny, Cordelia, Sebastian - perhaps Bridey and Mrs Muspratt - keeping my name in their prayers; or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, he won't quite despair of me in the end.'

[anexercisebook-blog1]

love & illusion (under construction)

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED:

"I was aghast to realise that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognised the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has to keep house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly."

"the faint, unrecognised apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city"; "entrancing"; "enchanted palace"

"I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sear-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed." ... "I had left behind me - what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, 'the Young Magician's Compendium', that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard bill, the penny that folded double, and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle."

"'I have left behind illusion,' I said to myself. 'Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions - with the aid of my five senses.' I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue."

*

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD:

"And this was the funny part: for all the depth of his bafflement he couldn't help noticing that April's voice, different as it was, possessed a quality that made it oddly similar to Maureen Grube's voice telling of the fabulous people Norma knew, or saying 'Visual Aids' - a quality of play-acting, of slightly false intensity, a way of seeming to speak less to him than to some romantic abstraction."

"Play-acting or not, her voice in moods of love had always been a pretty sound."

"the first thing he had to do ... was to walk up and deal like a man with Maureen Grube."

[anexercisebook-blog1]

love & innocence

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED:

"He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind."

'a pair of children the two of you'

"that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of a nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence."

'It is a kind of love that comes to children before they learn its meaning.'

'When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood - innocence, God, hope.' ... 'Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence.' ... 'Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. His teddy-bear, his nanny ... and he is nineteen years old ...'

"All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more in the shadows and, like a fetish, hidden first from the missionary and at length forgotten, the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the chest-of-drawers in Sebastian's bedroom."

"when that lovely, spidery child of nineteen, as though brought in for an hour from the nursery and nettled by lack of attention from the grown-ups, had said: 'I'm causing anxiety, too, you know,' and I had thought at the time, scarcely, it now seemed to me, in long trousers myself, 'How important these girls make themselves with their love affairs.'"

"That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.

'Sadder, too,' I said.

'Oh yes, much sadder.'"

[anexercisebook-blog1]

love & nature/setting (under construction)

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED:

SUMMARY: Charles' friendship with Sebastian is intertwined with nature & beauty - "those distant Arcadian days" - in the 'unspoiled, harmonious wilderness' (how Arcadia, a region of Greece, was considered during the European Renaissance) Sebastian is free; summer, and when they are in Venice, is when they are happiest; things falter in autumn and are never the same again. There is a recurrent use of sweetness to describe their happiness - the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine; The fortnight in Venice passed quickly and sweetly. Light is also crucial in the imagery used to describe their friendship - stream of sun-lit foam, reflected in a dapple of light on painted ceilings when they are happy in Venice; when they are back at Oxford, the golden lights seemed diffuse and remote. Julia and Charles discover/declare/consummate their love during a storm: they are orphans of the storm, isolated together 'like King Lear, only we are each all three of them - Kent, Lear, Fool'; they remain isolated ('Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God too, were in a conspiracy against us.') long after the storm, until they are forced to part. Wintry imagery is used to represent the end of their relationship (the last echoes died on the white slopes).

*

"I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my last."

"On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine - as Sebastian had promised, they were delicious together - and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian's eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger's breadth above the turf and hold us suspended."

'If it could only be like this always - always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe, and Aloysius in a good temper...'

"It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we wandered alone together through that enchanted palace"

"The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly - perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless. On some days life kept pace with the gondola, as we nosed through the side-canals and the boatman uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days with the speed-boat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sun-lit foam; it left a confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool, marble interiors; of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light on painted ceilings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might have known, and another Byronic night fishing for scampi in the shallows of Chiaggia, the phosphorescent wake of the little ship, the lantern swinging in the prow"

autumn - "wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls" (I Capture the Castle: "Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?"); "the golden lights were diffuse and remote"; "the twilight under the arches"; "The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of June had died with the gillyflowers, whose scent at my windows now yielded to the damp leaves, smouldering in a corner of the quad." 

"'This is no way to start a new year,' said Sebastian; but this sombre October evening seemed to breathe its chill, moist air over the succeeding weeks."

"once again the gillyflowers bloomed under my windows and the chestnut lit the streets and the warm stones strewed their flakes upon the cobble; but it was not as it had been; there was mid-winter in Sebastian's heart."

'Oh dear,' said Julia, 'where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?'

"The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mound glittered and lay still in the silent valley."

GREAT EXPECTATIONS:

"'You, so young, untried, and beautiful, Estella! Surely it is not in Nature.' 'It is in my nature,' she returned. And then she added, with a stress upon the words, 'It is in the nature formed within me.'"

[anexercisebook-blog1]

vocab list for russian (under construction)

СЛОВАРЬ российская императрица - Russian empress свергла с престол - deposed from the throne провёла реорганизацию Сената - conducted the reorganisation of the Senate секуляризацию земель - secularisation of land упразднила гетманство - celebrated nobility возглавляла - headed комиссию - commission произошла Крестьянская война - there was the Peasant War издала - established/published управления - rule губернией - province грамоту - document дворянству - nobility русско-турецких войн - Russo-Turkish war приняла под российское подданство Восточную Грузию - annexed East Georgia to Russia в период правления - in the period of rule переписывалась (с) - correspondence (with) деятелями - leaders французского Просвещения - French Enlightenment воспитание - upbringing происхождение - origin/background состояла - was в родстве - in childhood королевский домашнее образование богословия обучалась проявился вместе с тем крещена по православному обычаю под именем вступления на престол поставила себе цель завоевать расположение народа личная жизнь складывалась неудачно в течение двора обратилась к сформировали её мировоззрение стала последовательной сторонницей идей Просвещения интересовалась традициями обычаями слухи половине впоследствии король ухудшение стала опасаться судьбу в случае прихода власти принялась вербовать себе сторонников при дворе показное благочестие рассудительность испенняя любов к Росси резко поведением позволить великосветского столичного общества целом населения вступление (на престол) в течение появился высылки тщательно готовить заговор опираясь на поддержку в ночь на тайно прибыла казармах полка самодержавной вскоре восставишим весть вошествии встречена петербуржцами для предступреждения свергнутого посланы гонцы происшедшем предложения о переговорах отвергнуты во главе выступить по дороге письменное отречение (Петра) от престола 9 июдя 1762 года Екатерина пришла к власти в результате дворцого переворота поднял на ноги заговорщиков испугавшихся арестованный под пыткой привезена прямо выбежать тотчас присягнул Екатерина поехала в Казанский собор, где на молебне её возгласили самодержавной императрицей движению