If you're not a big fan of the stream-of-consciousness writing style, this book may not be for you. It's a very inside-his-head portrait of the high school and college years of this young man. It includes his fall into moral sins, those of masturbation and fornication, and the deep despair his Catholic school drives into him about the peril of his soul. There are some gratuitous descriptions of his feelings during his encounters. He repents and forsakes his sinning, but later also forsakes God.
There are many bits of wisdom to be gleaned. On page 76 he remembers "Even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones's Road he had felt that some power was divesting him of that sudden woven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel." The power of exercise and nature to relieve our negative emotions and draw us closer to God.
There is also a fascinating discussion of aesthetics and beauty near the end of the novel, including this description of 'the enchantment of the heart':
The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the estheic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.
There are many bits of wisdom to be gleaned. On page 76 he remembers "Even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones's Road he had felt that some power was divesting him of that sudden woven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel." The power of exercise and nature to relieve our negative emotions and draw us closer to God.
There is also a fascinating discussion of aesthetics and beauty near the end of the novel, including this description of 'the enchantment of the heart':
The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the estheic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.
Though I don't recommend the entire book, the discussion of aesthetics was decidedly engaging to me and I recommend it to any who enjoy such discussions. It began on page 198 in my copy of the novel, with the statement "Aristotle has not defined pity and terror," and ends on page 209 with "The rain fell faster." I don't agree with the conclusion drawn of this discussion in the book, but the discussion itself was enlightening.
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