Judge of the effect of Don Quijote in the midst of such awful joylessness! The discovery of that book, read beneath the second lime-tree in the walk beside the sunken parterre where the ground was a foot lower, and where I used to sit, is perhaps the greatest period of my life.
Qu'on juge de l'effet de Don Quichotte au milieu d'une si horrible tristesse! La découverte de ce livre, lu sous le second tilleul de l'allée du côté du parterre dont le terrain s'enfonçait d'un pied, et là je m'asseyais, est peut-être la plus grande époque de ma vie.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, April 16, 2014
The Greatest Period of My Life
Stendhal (1783-1842), The Life of Henry Brulard, tr. John Sturrock (New York: New York Review Books, 2002), p. 99: