ellauri053.html on line 975: On my father’s desk I discovered two bound volumes containing copies of letters written by him to my cousin Indira. My cousin had evidently carefully preserved all the letters and copied them out in her beautiful handwriting in the two volumes neatly decorated by her brother Surendranath.
ellauri060.html on line 243: In 1685, Defoe joined the ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion but gained a pardon, by which he escaped the Bloody Assizes of Judge George Jeffreys. Queen Mary and her husband William III were jointly crowned in 1689, and Defoe became one of William's close allies and a secret agent. Some of the new policies led to conflict with France, thus damaging prosperous trade relationships for Defoe. In 1692, he wanxus arrested for debts of £700 and, in the face of total debts that may have amounted to £17,000, was forced to declare bankruptcy. He died with little wealth and evidently embroiled in lawsuits with the royal treasury.
ellauri107.html on line 148: Twelve years ago I saw him through his last love. A young person less than half his age whose family strongly disapproved of the association and who evidently grew to disapprove of it herself. It was a trauma that might have plowed Philip under and that he told aslant in Exit Ghost, the novel dedicated to me (!). A couple of failed attempts at courtship followed, boring and painful for the women involved. Then he closed the door on heteroerotic life entirely. He’d learned how to be an elderly gentleman who behaves correctly. He joined the ranks of the impotent.
ellauri107.html on line 250: Billy is first the victim of Claggart’s closet, one with similarities to the Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover kinds that project self-loathing onto their targets. Vere’s condition, on the other hand, while containing degrees of benevolence, ultimately emerges as more deadly than Claggart’s. Associating his heart with his hated feminine side, Vere crushes down his capacity for love and compassion with a thoroughly brutal, Night-of-the-Long-Knives sort of intolerance. He, who would never have initiated Billy’s demise, will not permit his own ardor to soften his inflexible judgment, as that would evidently equate with irresolution and weakness. After all, he might rationalize, he is the Captain and the Captain has an image to uphold – right? Forget justice; forget humane treatment; maintaining machismo holds precedence over all! And the tragic result: mindless, meaningless, totally unnecessary suffering and loss on the altar of nothing less than evil itself!
ellauri146.html on line 662: “I am a Virginian,” declared Poe; and “the distinguishing features of Virginian character at present-features of a marked nature—not elsewhere to be met with in America-and evidently akin to that chivalry which denoted the Cavalier—can be in no manner so well accounted for as by considering them the debris of a devoted loyalty.” Poe’s Virginia background may or may not have rendered him typically American, but it seems reasonable to think that it fostered in him a Virginian Anglo-American attitude as opposed to an Anglophobic Americanism so common at that time in New England.
ellauri183.html on line 166: In his lectures on the Book of Genesis in the 16th century, Martin Luther praised Abraham for his uncritical obedience to God – for the "blind faith" exhibited by his refusal to question whether it was right to kill Isaac. In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant took the opposite view, arguing that Abraham should have reasoned that such an evidently immoral command could not have come from God. For Luther, divine authority trumps any claim on behalf of reason or morality, whereas for Kant there can be nothing higher than the moral law.
ellauri188.html on line 126: But what is more to the point under discussion is that Mr. Wester evidently overlooks the fact that many of these pure bloods are leaving descendants, mixed bloods, to be sure, but just as much interested in the preservation of their ancient food, the bread fruit, as were their ancestors. Will not this fact tend to preserve these trees for a long time to come?
ellauri197.html on line 303: The reader can infer, whatever this memory is, that it is not a good one because if it were pleasant, the narrator would not be “happy” to “forget” it, and also because the situation linked to it is noted as an “adversity.” Not only is that memory evidently unpleasant, but the scenario has an “advers[e]” effect on her current life.
ellauri302.html on line 141: Enter Shloyme and Hindel. The first is a tall, sturdy chap; wears long boots and a short coat. He is a knavish fellow, whose eyes blink with stealthy cunning as he speaks. The second is a rather old girl, with a wan face and wearing clothes much too young for her years. Shloyme and Hindel are evidently at ease and feel at home. They are clearly evil characters.
ellauri302.html on line 148: rapidly, making ingratiating gestures as he does so. He appears to be much at home, and evidently entertains a high opinion of himself. I beg your pardon, Scribe; I beg your pardon. (Quietly, to Yekel and Sarah.) You ought to act more decently. It's high time. People are coming and...
ellauri368.html on line 320: Then came Perl, show inserted more than just a grain of sand into the happy oyster of hasidic life. Joseph Perl hailed from Tarnopol and became an erudite follower of the Jewish Enlightenment, or haskalah. He learned German and published an attack on the Hasidim in that language, Ueber das Wesen der Sekte Hasidim (on the essence of the Hasidic Sect, 1816). In so doing he aroused the ire of the hasidim; Perl encodes both his scorn and their fury into his epistolary novel, Revealer of Secrets. The plot of Revealer of Secrets revolves around an offensive anti-hasidic book in German, which is evidently Perl's own tract dating from 1816. The hasidic characters in Revealer of Secrets plot to find and destroy the offending book; in the course of their fictional search, they reveal many of the baser traits that Perl attacked in his 1816 essay.
xxx/ellauri103.html on line 205: I am hopeful that the concept of “cultural appropriation” is a passing fad: rubbing people with different backgrounds against each other and exchanging our flaky ideas and shady practices against their money is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.
xxx/ellauri268.html on line 259: Merope loved her husband very much and wanted him to love her of his own free will. As such, not long after learning about her pregnancy, Merope decided to lift the enchantment. She hoped that once free, Tom would return her affection and be delighted to learn that he was an expecting father. In the event that did not happen, Merope assumed that Tom would do the honorable thing and stay for the sake of his child. This hope however, turned out to be misplaced and forlorn. What exactly happened is not known, but after coming to his senses, Tom Riddle reacted very badly to his situation. It is not known what words were exchanged between husband and wife, but evidently, Merope either told Tom the full story or enough for him to figure out what had happened. Far from being loving or understanding, Tom was justifiably furious at Merope for intervening in and (from his perspective) ruining his life. Merope's world was shattered when Tom Riddle made very clear that:
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