Thursday, December 10, 2020

1,001 Nights: 16

 

"Ligeia" by Edgar Allan Poe (story)

Unappealing story, honestly. The worst of Poe's excesses. The narrator--bad memory--tries to recall what his life was like in life. She was always, to him, a mysterious figure. She dies, he remarries, and she possesses the new wife. The makings for a terrific story but so much is caught up in the narrator's failure of recollection.

"Damon the Mower" by Andrew Marvell (poem)

A gardener pines for his sweetheart, one day cuts his foot with a scythe, bleeds out, dies. Acknowledges that Death is a lover too.

"Politics" by Ralph Waldo Emerson (essay)

Governments are built to protect persons and property, Emerson writes. In the past it was easier to separate the rights of one domain from the other, but now that property rights so often encroach upon personal rights, best for persons to push for those rights which would allow them maximum freedom as individuals. Not Marx. More American anarchical, like his friend Thoreau.

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