1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
I don't get memed that often, and this one is among the more intriguing. So I'll bite.
1. I picked up a sufficiently pretentious book--Seven Storey Mountain--in a sufficiently pretentious edition (1948 hardback) to make me look thoughtful and classically intelligent rather than juvenile and stupid, as would have been the case if I had already gotten the giant graphic novel (a pretentious term meaning "comic book") out of my backpack.
2. Page 123 is yellowed with age, being as it is unprotected by the acid-free mandates that came to publishing much later than 1948.
3. The fifth complete sentence, appearing halfway down the page on the eighteenth line, reads as follows: "This, as I see it, was also a kind of a grace: the greatest grace in the positive order that I got out of Cambridge."
4. Though tempted to look backward and determine what antecedent is characterized here as "this," I will instead follow the rules of the meme and write forward:
All the rest were negative. They were only graces in the sense that God in His mercy was permitting me to fly as far as I coulde from His love but at the same time preparing to confront me, at the end of it all, and in the bottom of the abyss, when I thought I had gone the farthest away from Him. Si ascendero in coelum, tu illic es.
I think the Latin is a reference to Psalm 139, rendered in The Message as "If I go underground, you're there!" But I'm only guessing; coelum, according to Wikipedia, is a body cavity.
5. Your turns, Web, Elaine, Jenn, Margaret and Pete! (Margaret's The Organic God was thisclose to being my entry, by the way.)
5 comments:
What a great quote you found. Almost makes me want to read pages 1-122 and 123 and on!
You can find my response on my blog...
I responded, and actually tagged others. It's up on my blog too.
I did it! I did it! (Thanks to my quick-reading mother; I haven't been visiting blogs much lately--not even mine.) My selections was not nearly so profound nor witty as yours. But . . . I still kinda like it, nonetheless.
This was harder than I thought -- the first book had graphs on page 123, the second and third didn't have enough sentences and the fourth was some weird dialogue. i got tired and decided to just go with this: emma, by jane austen (which allen has been reading for ages),
That was the worst of all. Every part of it brought pain and humiliation, of some sort or other; but, compared with the evil to Harriet, all was light; and she would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken-- more in error--more disgraced by mis-judgment, than she actually was, could the effects of her blunders have been confined to herself.
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