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Length, I want to suggest, has a peculiar significance for the reader of a Victorian novel and especially so if we are concerned with an awareness of it as a book; a physical object held in the hand... The distinctive achievement of novels like Bleak House and Middlemarch is an expanding density and complexity towards the creation of a realised and felt fictional world. Their imaginative breadth demands both a spatial freedom and temporal capacity equal to the creative intention... The Victorian novel, then, assumes through its length the possibility of a completed and enclosed fictional world. The reading experience, through a linear and sequential development will be, quite obviously, distinct from, say Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. It is what Josipovici has called the 'swelling continuity' of Victorian narrative, a form which encourages a particular kind of reading response: Reading an intricately plotted nineteenth-century novel is very much like travelling by train. Once one has paid for one's ticket and found one's seat one can settle down in comfort and forget all everyday worries until one reaches one's destination, secure that one is in good hands ↗
What The Mysteries of Udolpho suggests is how a novel, by presenting phenomena before it present resolutions, can create an on-going, perhaps spurious, but nevertheless compelling dynamic between details which can undermine the ability of form to impose its particular tyranny on the reader's experience: there is a life in the novel which comes from within. ↗
The past is not another country; it is another life. The texture of daily living is different now than in the past, more different the further back we look, until we find people whose experiences created a psychology we might find baffling or rude. Many details that once made up the daily round are lost to us because people considered them too trivial to write down. Knowing the past means knowing what people carried in their pockets, what they did with their sewage, where their dogs slept. Those details may seem unimportant, but what they convey is not. ↗
When you try to force your dream to “happen faster” you will only create fear and thus, resistance. As you try to force it you are actually sending energy into the universe that “you are not in reach of your dream and it’s not coming fast enough”. This will then create frustrations and anxiety. The universe will respond to your emotional state and give you like energy (more experiences to create fear and anxiety). ↗
I think I was always interested in the larger world, even as a kid, and my experiences as a journalist only heightened that interest. Covering conflict, I learned that though leaders often try to create a sense of "us" and "them," the differences are not that delineated. I often felt like it was a whole bunch of "us," with some of "them" scattered around. That made me feel that the borders we draw around ourselves are often artificial. ↗
Some may wonder whether part of the harvest of this invisible pollution (electromagnetic radiation) may be the comparative rarity of visionary experience in the modern world, and the predominence of a removed, overanalytical, repelling 'onlooker' intelligence in its place, resembling that of the (Martin) Amis hero (who will not see because he cannot feel). If this is so, such an intelligence has produced conditions favoring its evolution and survival. ↗
A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth. ↗
For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question. ↗
Ernie got it,' I said afterwards. 'His experience taught him that you've got to fight for what's right. It gets you into a lot of trouble but he came to the same conclusion as me.' People think it could never happen here. Don't you believe it; it doesn't take much. ↗
