#the infinite

[pilferingapples]

HAPPY MAIN CHARACTER DAY !!!

Congratulations, Les Mis Letters, on reading far enough to meet the REAL Main Characters of the novel!

This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite. Man is the second.- LM 2.7.1

[myveryunhealthyobsession]

Tom on the open ears project podcast (old)

Such a gift to have found this today. His voice and his soul are gifts to this world.

[starsalvation]

—Ada Hoffman, The Infinite

[poems-from-around-the-world]

The Infinite - Giacomo Leopardi - Italy

Translator: Matilda Colarossi (Italian)

Always dear to me was this solitary hill

and this brush, which many sides

of the distant horizon hides from view.

But sitting and marvelling, interminable

space there beyond, and superhuman

silence, and piercing stillness

do my mind envisage, until my heart

can endure no more. And as the wind

I hear rustling through the foliage, the

infinite silence to that voice

do I compare: I remember eternity,

and the seasons gone, and the one present

and alive, and its sound. And in that

immensity do my thoughts plunge:

and drowning is to me sweet in that sea.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“The Arch of Time is a 180-meter-high natural stone arch, one of the largest of its kind in the world, located in the canyon of the La Venta River in Cintalapa de Figueroa, Chiapas, in the state of Chiapas. The canyon is an 80-kilometer-long ravine with walls up to 400 meters high and narrows sometimes only ten meters and more than 80 million years old. In it you can find caves and waterfalls on its walls and viewpoints. This arch was formally discovered in 1989 by Italian explorers.”

—Alburki Alburki :: (Leila L’Abate)

* * * *

“The textures of the world are an outline of the infinite. [Wallace] Stevens said, or at least I seem to remember that he said, the thing seen becomes the thing unseen. He also said that the reverse way was impossible. [Theodore] Roethke wrote that all finite things reveal infinitude. What we have, and all we will have, is here in the earthly paradise. How to wring music from it, how to squeeze light out of it, is, as it has always been, the only true question. I’d say that to love the visible things in the visible world is to love their apokatastatic outline in the invisible next.”

— Charles Wright, from an interview by J.D. McClatchy “The Art of Poetry XLI,” Quarter Notes: Improvisations and Interviews (University of Michigan Press, 1995)

[dolphin1812]

I love that Hugo concludes this chapter by saying that God found Napoleon embarrassing and that’s why he lost.

We get more detail on Napoleon’s question to Lacoste here, and we see examples of his strategic skill here even as he misses the real problem. Spotting a chapel in the distance, he asks Lacoste if there’s an obstacle in that area, suggesting that he might have been capable of deducing that there was a road. However, in posing the question, Napoleon implicitly recognizes his need for others, even if only as a source of information. The problem is that, seeing himself as having ultimate control over everything, he doesn’t account for the agency of others. Lacoste had no reason to personally support Napoleon (in fact, given how horribly we’ve seen him treat him, he had every reason to detest him). His brief response is enough to defeat Napoleon.

At the same time, Hugo doesn’t portray this inability to consider that Lacoste is lying as a strategic blunder. If anything, he continues to emphasize Napoleon’s “strategic genius” by having him ask the question in the first place. Instead, he posits that he was fated to lose; that it was God’s will; that he “had been denounced in the infinite.” He elaborates on it in this paragraph:

“The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the brain of one man,—this would be mortal to civilization were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,—these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear.”

On the one hand, Napoleon’s fall is due to hubris, with one man presuming to have too much power. This is part of the general force of history (as Hugo has discussed before) where the people judge the individual and, therefore, are the ultimate authority. Yet here, their authority comes from a specific source: the divine. Hearing the “pleas” that come from “smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,” the divine eventually intervenes on the side of those suffering (the people - specifically, the most unfortunate among them). Napoleon’s loss is a form of cosmic justice, and justice sides with the downtrodden. 

This notion of justice has, of course, a political point. Napoleon I is not the only person wronging the people (the monarchs in the novel, Napoleon III in Hugo’s lifetime). Perhaps they don’t fall immediately. But Hugo is asserting that eventually, divine justice will intervene on behalf of those who are suffering and will overthrow them. This chapter, then, is in part an explanation of how Napoleon missed such a key factor in his planning, but it is also a warning to rulers: not only must they listen to and respect the Lacostes of the world; they must remember that true power resides with the people and never in one person.

[wizardsvslesbians]

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: THE FALLEN and THE INFINITE

We were so delighted with The Outside that we decided to cover its sequels!  We probably shouldn't have.

Publishers sure do love their trilogies. Sometimes it's better not to follow the author's train of thought to the end, though.