perverse to a miracle

It's Friday night, and I'm at home alone because I didn't feel I could muster the social wherewithal this evening to play pool and make conversation of even the most desultory sort. It's raining like a motherfucker, and I keep thinking of this passage from Charlotte Bronte's Villette:

At that time, I well remember whatever could excite — certain accidents of the weather, for instance, were almost dreaded by me, because they woke the being I was always lulling, and stirred up a craving cry I could not satisfy. One night a thunder-storm broke; a sort of hurricane shook us in our beds: the Catholics rose in panic and prayed to their saints. As for me, the tempest took hold of me with tyranny: I was roughly roused and obliged to live. I got up and dressed myself, and creeping outside the casement close by my bed, sat on its ledge, with my feet on the roof of a lower adjoining building. It was wet, it was wild, it was pitch-dark. Within the dormitory they gathered round the night-lamp in consternation, praying loud. I could not go in: too resistless was the delight of staying with the wild hour, black and full of thunder, pealing out such an ode as language never delivered to man — too terribly glorious, the spectacle of clouds, split and pierced by white and blinding bolts.

I did long, achingly, then and for four and twenty hours afterwards, for something to fetch me out of my present existence, and lead me upwards and onwards. This longing, and all of a similar kind, it was necessary to knock on the head; which I did, figuratively, after the manner of Jael to Sisera, driving a nail through their temples. Unlike Sisera, they did not die: they were but transiently stunned, and at intervals would turn on the nail with a rebellious wrench: then did the temples bleed, and the brain thrill to its core.

They woke the being I was always lulling, and stirred up a craving cry I could not satisfy. So nice, don't you think? Villette inches closer and closer to an uncontested spot at the top of the list of my favorite books of all time. For me, Lucy Snowe is pretty much the platonic ideal of the female protagonist: clever and coy, perverse and acidic, witty and self-deprecating, touchy, vulnerable, and proud; she's full of convoluted emotion and tragic yearning, but she would desperately like you to think that she would like you to think she remains always logical and pragmatic. She's a bald liar, but she can't help it; she urgently wants you to know the truth about her, but she's absolutely unable to speak it, so she buries it in a shallow grave of denial and transparent misdirection. In all her twisted, contrarian glory — hiding to reveal, damning to praise — she's a shockingly fully-realized character.

Anyway. I guess what you should take away from this is, if Lucy Snowe was a real person, I would be so gay for her. Also, I like listing adjectives. That is all.


And now for something completely different: x-ray porn. Did I say that? I meant art. X-rayted art. Yay!


Aaaaaand also: snakes on a plane, dudes.