Hi! I’ve started reading Brideshead Revisited—mostly because you seem to really like it and recommend it a lot! I like to annotate books and take notes; are there any themes you particularly like about it and recommend looking out for?
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhh......!!!!!!!!!!!!!!....!!!
THE FLAME IS LIT IN THE CHAPEL
My dear friend, the flame is lit in the chapel!
Themes I like. Themes I – like? Everything. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps both. (Do I seem to like it? It is my favourite book in the world. I am not sure if I can say that I like it, but boy! does it belong to me. I wonder if it likes me – as far as a book could like a person. If it does, then in a David Eliot sort of way [by the way, if you have trouble with the ending of this book or see it as a sad ending, I recommend to you the novel The Bird in the Tree], inflicting pain as a good surgeon does.
A few notes in the beginning: it's an incredibly beautiful novel. In every way. And not only the first part, as some would like to claim, reducing it to a "dark-light academia fluffy gay-ish romance with strawberrries" and suchlike. All three parts, and the Prologue and Epilogue, are beautiful, important, and (though in some ways different) interconnected. If you want to watch an adaptation, go for the 1981 series, which is brilliant. Avoid the 2008 film, which is horrid.
Themes that stick out to me in particular – that simply happen to (come to mind to) me:
The flame is lit in the chapel (and Brideshead still standing) (and all that in the Age of Hooper)
Every single thing Cordelia says. Pay good attention to everything Cordelia says, especially later on!
The inexorable call of the Church, the inevietable pursuit of and by and through God
Love and all that is Good of it (and all the pain it can bring)
Choosing the Right thing against all odds, against all desires, against all expectations
Finding, having, and in some ways losing (yet somehow never truly losing) a home, as an outsider who is perhaps even more at home than everyone else, and coming back, physically, and spiritually, even when it is lost, when times have changed, when that place – and that sort of place – does not exist anymore, because its essence will never leave you (Sic transit gloria mundi)
Being a Catholic in the Diaspora – Being an imperfect Catholic in the Diaspora! (oh how much more perfect and pious and pure Catholics are expected to be in non-Catholic environments!) – Belonging to a deeply paradoxial culture, and truly belonging to the paradox more than to any plain and simple conventionality
More universal than that: being different at the same time as being not different at all, being different in the sense that the same life is experienced with a different sort of light; belonging (and not) and then elsewhere (and not that either)
The ultimate Paradox that Charles found what will truly be his way through those who appear more wayward than anyone else (and perhaps just because of that!)
SEBASTIAN [contra mundum]
Vocations, what Cordelia says about Vocations!
Friendship, loyalty, and when it's just that that goes wrong
(Do not underestimate Julia. And do not judge Lady Marchmain too quickly)
The war, "the Age of Hooper", and the Time That Was
"homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless"
I teared up writing this, but I also know that this list is incomplete and unbalanced, because I am not currently concentrating properly on the matter. I will come back to this if something else occurs to me, if you don't mind. In any case, it is a sublime book – and there is so much to it! I sincerely recommend to pay good attention, to all sorts of little bits! And to be open, to each and every one character, and part and chapter.
Oh, and let's not forget Aloysius! Not a theme but a Very Important Character.
And I would still also like to say that, though the setting of this book might appear distant and antiquated to a reader (I have read enough reviews to know that this is a common opinion) that everything this book is about is still (and, in a way again, these last few years) very, very relevant. (I do not think that contemporary relevance is a necessecity for an old book, but nevertheless it does simply happen to be so with this one.)
Oh, I do so love this book. (And I am so incredibly glad that my posts about it made you all the more interested!)
titsay
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stormborns
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germansingergirl
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dailybridgerton
