The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (pdf e book reader txt) 📕
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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a fictional autobiography of the eponymous narrator, contains—perhaps surprisingly—little about either his life or opinions, but what it does have is a meandering journey through the adventures of his close family and their associates. The book is famous for being more about the explanatory diversions and rabbit-holes that the narrator takes us down than the actual happenings he set out to describe, but in doing so he paints a vivid picture of the players and their personal stories.
Published two volumes at a time over the course of eight years, Tristram Shandy was an immediate commercial success although not without some confusion among critics. Sterne’s exploration of form that pushed at the contemporary limits of what could be called a novel has been hugely influential, garnering admirers as varied as Marx, Schopenhauer, Joyce, Woolf and Rushdie. The book has been translated into many other languages and adapted for the stage, radio, and film.
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- Author: Laurence Sterne
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It is said in Aristotle’s Masterpiece, “That when a man doth think of anything which is past,⸺he looketh down upon the ground;⸺but that when he thinketh of something that is to come, he looketh up towards the heavens.”
My uncle Toby, I suppose, thought of neither, for he look’d horizontally.—Right end! quoth my uncle Toby, muttering the two words low to himself, and fixing his two eyes insensibly as he muttered them, upon a small crevice, formed by a bad joint in the chimneypiece⸺Right end of a woman!⸺I declare, quoth my uncle, I know no more which it is than the man in the moon;⸺and if I was to think, continued my uncle Toby (keeping his eye still fixed upon the bad joint) this month together, I am sure I should not be able to find it out.
Then, brother Toby, replied my father, I will tell you.
Everything in this world, continued my father (filling a fresh pipe)—everything in this world, my dear brother Toby, has two handles.⸺Not always, quoth my uncle Toby.⸺At least, replied my father, everyone has two hands,⸺which comes to the same thing.⸺Now, if a man was to sit down coolly, and consider within himself the make, the shape, the construction, come-at-ability, and convenience of all the parts which constitute the whole of that animal, called Woman, and compare them analogically⸺I never understood rightly the meaning of that word,—quoth my uncle Toby.—
Analogy, replied my father, is the certain relation and agreement which different⸺Here a devil of a rap at the door snapped my father’s definition (like his tobacco-pipe) in two,—and, at the same time, crushed the head of as notable and curious a dissertation as ever was engendered in the womb of speculation;—it was some months before my father could get an opportunity to be safely delivered of it:—And, at this hour, it is a thing full as problematical as the subject of the dissertation itself,—(considering the confusion and distresses of our domestick misadventures, which are now coming thick one upon the back of another) whether I shall be able to find a place for it in the third volume or not.
VIIIIt is about an hour and a half’s tolerable good reading since my uncle Toby rung the bell, when Obadiah was ordered to saddle a horse, and go for Dr. Slop, the man-midwife;—so that no one can say, with reason, that I have not allowed Obadiah time enough, poetically speaking, and considering the emergency too, both to go and come;⸺though, morally and truly speaking, the man perhaps has scarce had time to get on his boots.
If the hypercritick will go upon this; and is resolved after all to take a pendulum, and measure the true distance betwixt the ringing of the bell, and the rap at the door;—and, after finding it to be no more than two minutes, thirteen seconds, and three fifths,—should take upon him to insult over me for such a breach in the unity, or rather probability of time;—I would remind him, that the idea of duration, and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas,⸺and is the true scholastic pendulum,⸺and by which, as a scholar, I will be tried in this matter,—abjuring and detesting the jurisdiction of all other pendulums whatever.
I would therefore desire him to consider that it is but poor eight miles from Shandy-Hall to Dr. Slop, the man-midwife’s house;—and that whilst Obadiah has been going those said miles and back, I have brought my uncle Toby from Namur, quite across all Flanders, into England:—That I have had him ill upon my hands near four years;—and have since travelled him and Corporal Trim in a chariot-and-four, a journey of near two hundred miles down into Yorkshire,⸺all which put together, must have prepared the reader’s imagination for the entrance of Dr. Slop upon the stage,—as much, at least (I hope) as a dance, a song, or a concerto between the acts.
If my hypercritick is intractable, alledging, that two minutes and thirteen seconds are no more than two minutes and thirteen seconds,—when I have said all I can about them; and that this plea, though it might save me dramatically, will damn me biographically, rendering my book from this very moment, a professed Romance, which, before, was a book apocryphal:⸺If I am thus pressed—I then put an end to the whole objection and controversy about it all at once,⸺by acquainting him, that Obadiah had not got above threescore yards from the stable-yard before he met with Dr. Slop;—and indeed he gave a dirty proof that he had met with him, and was within an ace of giving a tragical one too.
Imagine to yourself;—but this had better begin a new chapter.
IXImagine to yourself a little squat, uncourtly figure of a Doctor Slop, of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back, and a sesquipedality of belly, which might have done honour to a serjeant in the horse-guards.
Such were the outlines of Dr. Slop’s figure, which,—if you have read Hogarth’s analysis of beauty, and if you have not, I wish you would;⸺you must know, may as certainly be caricatured, and conveyed to
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