music, books, love and kindness

Oh Henry, you're not really the stick in the mud most people think you are...in fact, few writers (in my reading experience, at least) have captured the pain of broken hearts and being socially awkward the way you have.

I'll be circling the barn*with some of your most long-winded words ever and suddenly I feel caught off guard by how you manage to find little ticks and mean quirks smack dab in the middle of polite society. It's quite obvious that you and your equally famous brother William both had great insights into the human psyche...

And nothing has ever quite gotten to me the way Washington Square and Beast in the Jungle have...




*just a quick side note:

example of what seems like circling the barn, but in fact makes beautiful sense after more than one reading....see, the thing about Henry James is that you really need lots of patience to get through what he's saying, but the pay-off is very high:):


from the short story "Georgiana's Reasons":

1. 
   
   

   I.
   
   She was certainly a singular girl, and if he felt at the end that he
   did n't know her nor understand her, it is not surprising that he should
   have felt it at the beginning. But he felt at the beginning what he
   did not feel at the end, that her singularity took the form of a charm
   which--once circumstances had made them so intimate--it was impossible
   to resist or conjure away. He had a strange impression (it amounted
   at times to a positive distress, and shot through the sense of
   pleasure--morally speaking--with the acuteness of a sudden twinge of
   neuralgia) that it would be better for each of them that they should
   break off short and never see each other again. In later years he called
   this feeling a foreboding, and remembered two or th