With his subtle smile, Lord Henry watched him. He knew the precisepsychological moment when to say nothing. He felt intensely interested. He wasamazed at the sudden impression that his words had produced, and, remembering abook that he had read when he was sixteen, a book which had revealed to himmuch that he had not known before, he wondered whether Dorian Gray was passingthrough a similar experience. He had merely shot an arrow into the air. Had ithit the mark? How fascinating the lad was!
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Lord Henry had not yet come in. He was always late on principle, his principlebeing that punctuality is the thief of time. So the lad was looking rathersulky, as with listless fingers he turned over the pages of an elaboratelyillustrated edition of Manon Lescaut that he had found in one of thebook-cases. The formal monotonous ticking of the Louis Quatorze clock annoyedhim. Once or twice he thought of going away.
Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quotedfrom that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense. She didnot listen. She was free in her prison of passion. Her prince, Prince Charming,was with her. She had called on memory to remake him. She had sent her soul tosearch for him, and it had brought him back. His kiss burned again upon hermouth. Her eyelids were warm with his breath.
His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, hewondered. He went towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal stand that hadalways looked to him like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wroughtin silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an arm-chair and beganto turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was thestrangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisiteraiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world werepassing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of weresuddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were graduallyrevealed.
It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed,simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his lifetrying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes ofthought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as itwere, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had everpassed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men haveunwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men stillcall sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style,vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technicalexpressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of someof the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were init metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of thesenses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew attimes whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediæval saintor the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. Theheavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble thebrain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music,so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated,produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a formof reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling dayand creeping shadows.
Cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky gleamed throughthe windows. He read on by its wan light till he could read no more. Then,after his valet had reminded him several times of the lateness of the hour, hegot up, and going into the next room, placed the book on the little Florentinetable that always stood at his bedside and began to dress for dinner.
For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book.Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to freehimself from it. He procured from Paris no less than nine large-paper copies ofthe first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they mightsuit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which heseemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control. The hero, the wonderfulyoung Parisian in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were sostrangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And,indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life,written before he had lived it.
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either afterone of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one ofthose nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of thebrain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with thatvivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art itsenduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of thosewhose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually whitefingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In blackfantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouchthere. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the soundof men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming downfrom the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared towake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave.Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms andcolours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking theworld in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. Theflameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies thehalf-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had wornat the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had readtoo often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the nightcomes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we hadleft off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for thecontinuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or awild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a worldthat had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world inwhich things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have othersecrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive,at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance evenof joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.
The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had himselfknown this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how, crowned withlaurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as Tiberius, in a gardenat Capri, reading the shameful books of Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocksstrutted round him and the flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and,as Caligula, had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables andsupped in an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian, hadwandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round withhaggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his days, andsick with that ennui, that terrible tædium vitæ, that comes on thoseto whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear emerald at the redshambles of the circus and then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn bysilver-shod mules, been carried through the Street of Pomegranates to a Houseof Gold and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he passed by; and, as Elagabalus,had painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women, andbrought the Moon from Carthage and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.
As soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette and began sketching upon a piece ofpaper, drawing first flowers and bits of architecture, and then human faces.Suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew seemed to have a fantasticlikeness to Basil Hallward. He frowned, and getting up, went over to thebook-case and took out a volume at hazard. He was determined that he would notthink about what had happened until it became absolutely necessary that heshould do so.
Yes it does and in my personal opinion, it is wrong. You know, I read a couple of good articles on CNN Money that talked about Facebook and basically it's long term goals(if any). Not only that but why Facebook is big and so and why he hates(for real! LOL!). You know, either I'm new-school or old-school, there's a very, very big misconception about the Internet. I hope people understand that the internet is not known now as a tool, is used as a record...
And believe it or not, there's so much controversy about the Internet. With the anatomy, and most importantly, identity. For example, I choose to write to CNN or ESPN or G4, I choose to because is my right and quite honestly, my choice, not yours. You just have markets and ads to try to lure me but I ain't stupid, if I like you, I will talk to you. I will admit when I was young, I was crazy on the Internet. Geez, I was young(not A-rod young, LOL!) I'm sure those records are still around, why? Because if there's one thing I know about encryption is the fact is traceable, like blood. It can be months old, years old, even decades but to be fair, this is arguably the highest peak it ever reached. And to tell you the truth, for some reason, the American people are fascinated with conversations, goes back to the founding fathers. But now, is just on the Internet and guess what? Do you know why people seem to express themselves more openly than others? Or even say crazy things than others? Not because they know each other, let alone they never, ever met, but because communication and this important thing, attachment, is involve. Let's face it, the Internet is like a big community tool, you pick out which one you like or don't, is your choice. Is like a diary...when you have(if) one and start writing crazy stuff, what happens? Communication(speaking or thinking to themselves) and attachment(notebook of diary for sense of support) occurs, you probably feel better for letting it out, or feel worse, guess what? An emotion triggers... 2ff7e9595c
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