August Abolins to Alexander Koryagin:
I'm impressed with your likes. Ivanhoe is quite the epic
and filled with very "formal" yet an ancient way of
speaking and writing.
formal *and* ancient, because most of the time formal usage
is time-honoured usage.
L-o-n-g sentences!
But more amenable to parsing than, say, in M.R. James's
"Jolly corner":
He took it full in the face that something had happened
between--that he couldn't have noticed before (by which he
meant on his original tour of all the rooms that evening)
that such a barrier had exceptionally presented itself.
He had indeed since that moment undergone an agitation so
extraordinary that it might have muddled for him any ear-
lier view; and he tried to convince himself that he might
perhaps then have gone into the room and, inadvertently,
automatically, on coming out, have drawn the door after
him. The difficulty was that this exactly was what he
never did; it was against his whole policy, as he might
have said, the essence of which was to keep vistas clear.
He had them from the first, as he was well aware, quite on
the brain: the strange apparition, at the far end of one
of them, of his baffled "prey" (which had become by so
sharp an irony so little the term now to apply!) was the
form of success his imagination had most cherished, pro-
jecting into it always a refinement of beauty. He had
known fifty times the start of perception that had after-
wards dropped; had fifty times gasped to himself.
"There!" under some fond brief hallucination. The house,
as the case stood, admirably lent itself; he might wonder
at the taste, the native architecture of the particular
time, which could rejoice so in the multiplication of
doors--the opposite extreme to the modern, the actual
almost complete proscription of them; but it had fairly
contributed to provoke this obsession of the presence
encountered telescopically, as he might say, focused and
studied in diminishing perspective and as by a rest for
the elbow.
This entire paragraph feels to me like a bumpy road
whereover one (I) can hardly walk wighout he trips all the
time and falls often, hurting one's knees. I know this
sentence is dubious, but plead to Edrawd Albee, who wrote
(IIRC):
A man can put up with only so much without he descends a
rung or two down the old evolutionary ladder.
-- a strange constuction, perhaps colloqual...
---
* Origin: nntps://fidonews.mine.nu - Lake Ylo - Finland (2:221/360.0)