And in honor of the loving, iconoclastic, and defiant nature of Edmond’s and Winnaretta’s marriage, the last line of the epitaph, taken from Corinithians II, alluded to the concept of the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law: “For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”
In tribute to the Polignacs’ mutual love of music, the epitaph bore a line from Wagner’s Parsifal, sung in the opera by a chorus of celestial voices: “Selig in Glaube, Selig in Liebe” (Happy in faith, Happy in love).
parsifal came out in 1882, when the surviving widow in this couple was 17
which means this last tribute honestly has “put a banger line from Final Fantasy 7 on your husband’s tombstone” energy (complimentary)
face in hands. okay. not to make everything about Clair Obscur, but—
i’m reading about this eccentric belle époque sculptor, Jean-Joseph Carriès, who got a commission to make a big fancy Wagner-inspired gate & stuffed a bunch of Weird Goblin-Lookin’ Guys (“grotesques”) onto said gate, in a way that lowkey weirded out his client, but she was onboard for it anyway…
so i look up this guy’s sculptures and. this shit looks super nevron/visages-coded, right? like i would not be surprised if the game’s artists deliberately aped this for their creature designs…?
the fact that not all fanfic authors are able to produce good original fiction is a banal truism
but on the occasions i sniff out the fanfic alt of some tradpub author, i’m often surprised to see the opposite version, even though it feels like it could be just as much of a truism—some of these tradpub authors write kinda bad fanfic! much worse than their published work! it FEELS like it shouldn’t work in that direction, and yet…,,,
The legend goes that when D.H. Lawrence arrived in Florence or Rome for the first time, he went directly to his hotel room from the train station, pulled out his typewriter without unpacking anything else, and started writing an essay about Italy. His friends came to meet him. They had been expecting his arrival and were surprised to discover him already holed up, typing. Their surprise turned to amusement and astonished irritation when they realized that Lawrence was writing an essay about the character and nature of the Italian people, based only on fleeting and half-imagined impressions he had formed while driving from the train station to his hotel. He knew nothing about the place, at least not in the manner one is supposed to get to know places and peoples before bashing away at a typewriter about them. Here he was anyway, writing some declarative nonsense about Italia.
