Snowflake Challenge: Day 2

[llaeyro]

Day 2

In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

So, to keep things interesting, I'm going to just rule out Harry Potter for this one :P It's a valid candidate, but let's have something different.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Wilde's poetry and quotes had interested me for some time, so I went out to buy this book and finally read it when I was in my late teens or early twenties. My lord, was it hard work... I'm a slow reader anyway, but this took me months upon months because I kept having to read over sections again. He's just so loquacious and it's now rather old fashioned, making it difficult bedtime reading. I nearly gave up a few times, because he spends such a long time going on about things that have nothing to do with the plot. There's a lot of social narrative and criticism which rather went over my head as I know little of the class structure and norms of the late 19th Century.

However, within it, there were moments of perception and beauty which astounded me. One section in particular stays with me. It springs to mind from time to time, when trying to articulate an atmospheric concept. For me, it represents how I want to keep seeing the world, and how I hope that I, as a writer, can learn to express myself.

So, for your interest, here is the excerpt. It can be understood and appreciated entirely independently of the plot and characters.

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers, and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of tilings are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.