The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen (best books for students to read .txt) ๐
Description
An ancient Roman hilltop fort proves an irresistible draw to Lucian Taylor, but what awaits at the top isnโt just a view of the surrounding Welsh landscape but a bacchal experience his young soul isnโt ready for. This experience sets his path as he attempts to transcribe his increasingly elaborate visions into the perfect book; the book that will actually mean something more than the banal novels he sees the publishing houses push out.
The Hill of Dreams is a semi-autobiographical work, with Arthur Machen following a similar physical journey to the novel: a childhood in rural Wales followed by attempts to become an author in London. Machen was inspired by a review of Tristram Shandy that described it as โa picaresque of the mind,โ and determined to write โa Robinson Crusoe of the soul.โ The protagonistโs isolation from the rest of society certainly resonates with that description.
Machen wrote this ten years earlier than its original 1907 publication, it having been turned down by the publishers of the time. While it was mostly ignored on its initial release, it has picked up admirers over the years and is now viewed as one of Machenโs most important works.
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- Author: Arthur Machen
Read book online ยซThe Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen (best books for students to read .txt) ๐ยป. Author - Arthur Machen
From this utter darkness, from danger of madness, the ever dear and sweet Annie had rescued him. Very beautifully and fitly, as Lucian thought, she had done her work without any desire to benefit him, she had simply willed to gratify her own passion, and in doing this had handed to him the priceless secret. And he, on his side, had reversed the process; merely to make himself a splendid offering for the acceptance of his sweetheart, he had cast aside the vain world, and had found the truth, which now remained with him, precious and enduring.
And since the news of the marriage he found that his worship of her had by no means vanished; rather in his heart was the eternal treasure of a happy love, untarnished and spotless; it would be like a mirror of gold without alloy, bright and lustrous forever. For Lucian, it was no defect in the woman that she was desirous and faithless; he had not conceived an affection for certain moral or intellectual accidents, but for the very woman. Guided by the self-evident axiom that humanity is to be judged by literature, and not literature by humanity, he detected the analogy between โLycidasโ and Annie. Only the dullard would object to the nauseous cant of the one, or to the indiscretions of the other. A sober critic might say that the man who could generalize Herbert and Laud, Donne and Herrick, Sanderson and Juxon, Hammond and Lancelot Andrewes into โour corrupted Clergyโ must be either an imbecile or a scoundrel, or probably both. The judgment would be perfectly true, but as a criticism of โLycidasโ it would be a piece of folly. In the case of the woman one could imagine the attitude of the conventional lover; of the chevalier who, with his tongue in his cheek, โreverences and respectsโ all women, and coming home early in the morning writes a leading article on St. English Girl. Lucian, on the other hand, felt profoundly grateful to the delicious Annie, because she had at precisely the right moment voluntarily removed her image from his way. He confessed to himself that, latterly, he had a little dreaded her return as an interruption; he had shivered at the thought that their relations would become what was so terribly called an โintrigueโ or โaffair.โ There would be all the threadbare and common stratagems, the vulgarity of secret assignations, and an atmosphere suggesting the period of Mr. Thomas Moore and Lord Byron and โsegars.โ Lucian had been afraid of all this; he had feared lest love itself should destroy love.
He considered that now, freed from the torment of the body, leaving untasted the green water that makes thirst more burning, he was perfectly initiated in the true knowledge of the splendid and glorious love. There seemed to him a monstrous paradox in the assertion that there could be no true love without a corporal presence of the beloved; even the popular sayings of โAbsence makes the heart grow fonder,โ and โfamiliarity breeds contempt,โ witnessed to the contrary. He thought, sighing, and with compassion, of the manner in which men are continually led astray by the cheat of the senses. In order that the unborn might still be added to the born, nature had inspired men with the wild delusion that the bodily companionship of the lover and the beloved was desirable above all things, and so, by the false show of pleasure, the human race was chained to vanity, and doomed to an eternal thirst for the nonexistent.
Again and again he gave thanks for his own escape; he had been set free from a life of vice and sin and folly, from all the dangers and illusions that are most dreaded by the wise. He laughed as he remembered what would be the common view of the situation. An ordinary lover would suffer all the sting of sorrow and contempt; there would be grief for a lost mistress, and rage at her faithlessness, and hate in the heart; one foolish passion driving on another, and driving the man to ruin. For what would be commonly called the real woman he now cared nothing; if he had heard that she had died in her farm in Utter Gwent, he would have experienced only a passing sorrow, such as he might feel at the death of anyone he had once known. But he did not think of the young farmerโs wife as the real Annie; he did not think of the frostbitten leaves in winter as the real rose. Indeed, the life of many reminded him of the flowers; perhaps more especially of those flowers which
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