I was an optimistic, eternal cheerful children till I used to be 16 year-old. Then my life broke I had to live my parents and I lived in Budapest 220 km from my family. I lived different digs. I got acquainted with the sadness but it always changed I was optimistic or I was very sad. A young girl / excuse me but everybody told me " you are so beautiful"/ but this didn’t console me.
I met my husband. It was love for the first sight. My happiest time was when my children born. Our life wasn’t easy as my husband was an artist-painter. We got to know to live in privation. This doesn’t do anybody good. Quarrel…etc. We live through everything because the affection was never over.
I wrote this because yesterday I saw a play in a theatre. Its title was: Total eclipse. An English writer wrote : Christopher Hampton. My eyes filled with tear and I was shivering with cold. I am now under its influence. The plot : Love between Verlaine and Rimbaud. I knew that they were homosexuals but I never imagined their everyday life. These two poets’life was the hell. Who care about this now, we read their poems and take delight in them.
How many artists had to know the hell. For example Rembrandt who knew that his sun and his second wife sexually live together. And at last he was sold up and died in the almshouse. The one of the greatest painter in the world. And Van Gogh or Modigliani etc?
of course I know there are counterexamples but I think every artists has to make sacrifices for telling what they carry in themselves.
I can enumerate the Hungarian ones who committed suicide or died of hunger.
Yesterday I saw a very shocking but very artistic play in a theatre. Its title: Total eclipse. Its writer: Christopher Hampton, English writer. Who would think that these two gigantean poets’ every day life was a hell. We read their poems and take pleasure in them. This is normal. The life of the big artists sinks into oblivion.
Plot of the play /from Wikipedia /
The older Paul Verlaine meets the dead Arthur Rimbaud’s sister in a café in Paris. Rimbaud’s sister and mother want Verlaine to hand over any copies he may still have of Rimbaud poems so that they can burn them; they fear the lewdness of his writings. Verlaine reflects on the wild relationship he had had with Rimbaud, beginning when the teen-aged Rimbaud had sent his poetry to Verlaine from his home in the provinces in 1871. Verlaine, instantly fascinated, impulsively invites him to his rich father-in-law’s home in Paris, where he lives with his young, pregnant wife. The wild, eccentric Rimbaud displays no sense of manners or decency whatever, scandalising Verlaine’s pretentious, bourgeois in-laws.
Verlaine is seduced by the 16-year-old Rimbaud’s physical body as well as by the unique originality of his mind. The staid respectability of married, heterosexual life and easy, middle class surroundings had been stifling Verlaine’s admittedly sybaritic literary talent. His taking up with Rimbaud is as much a rebellion and a liberation as it is a giving in to self-indulgence and masochism. Rimbaud acts as sadistically to Verlaine as does Verlaine to his young wife, whom he eventually deserts. A violent, itinerant relationship ensues between the two poets, the sad climax of which arrives in Brussels when an enraged and practically insane Verlaine shoots and wounds Rimbaud and is sentenced to prison for sodomy and attempted murder.
In prison, Verlaine converts to Christianity, to his erstwhile lover’s disgust. Upon release he meets Rimbaud in Germany, vainly and mistakenly seeking to revive the relationship. The two men part, however, never to meet again. Bitterly renouncing literature in any form, Rimbaud travels the world alone, finally settling in Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia) to run a “trading post”. There he has a mistress and possibly a young boy-lover. A tumor in his right knee forces him back to France where his leg is amputated. Nevertheless, the cancer spreads and he dies at the age of 37. When he dies, the image of one of his most famous poems, Le Dormeur du val, appears.
Rimbaud’s sister asserts that her brother had accepted confession from a priest right before he died and shown Christian penitence, which is why only the censored versions of his poetry should survive. Verlaine pretends to agree but tears up her card after she leaves. Later, Verlaine, drinking absinthe (to which he has become addicted), sees a vision of Rimbaud, returned from some transcendent realm to express the love and respect Verlaine has thus posthumously earned.
[edit]
Unfortunately I found 4 mistakes, I would like to correct them:
1.I had to LEAVE my parents
2.I lived IN different digs
3.We LIVED through everything
4…his SON and his second wife
Thanks:
Kati
Excuse me but I got away from the subject in my previous letters.But I was interested in your idioms and sayings.
1.as happy as the day is long = very happy
2.things are looking up = things /business, sb’s situation/ becomes better
3.light at the end of tunnel = sth which makes you believe that a difficult or unpleasant situation will end.
4.You’ve never had it so good = sb make us believe that we’ve never had things so good.
5.Everything in the garden is lovely = it is a polite expression to praise sth/ words of praise
6.I’m feeling on the top of the world = to feel very good, as if one were ruling the world
7.be full of beens = to have a lot of energy and enthusiasm
8.Hence loathed Melancholy = go away melancholy because I hate it.
9.looking on the bright side = consider the positive aspects of a negative situation.
10.the light at the end of a tunnel =the end of a difficult period or a job.
11.Things are looking up= conditions looking better
Welcome Chandu to English - Test -Net. Before asking tips for easy Speaking
English, why don’t you try to attend test on the forum, i.e.Elementary, Intermediate,
Advance and Highlights of TOEIC LISTENING Exercises, then you will give tips to
your friends for Easy Speaking English. We cannot speak English so early and
easily unless we find ourself to be very interesting learner of that language.
Keep talking to your friends, chatting withour forum learners, keep reading
Alan Essays and attend test regularly without considering the time you spend for
that, Your motive should be learning the language as early as possible.
When we follow the same we can be master of that language.
Apart from all, you should have interest and trust ,with that only you can achieve your
goal, ambition and all.
Hi everybody. There were words “To Shakespeare’s mind a bachelor lives a life that’s as merry as the day is long”. Can anybody
say what this Shakespeare had in mind, what does it maen in simple and plane english?
I’m personally interested because I’ve just devorced. I remember mr. Weller from “Pikwick club” - the coachman (driver of the horse’s cab) – who sad to his son Sam Weller.
He sad " Sam, if you suddenly get to marry after 50 years old, you should better come into your room, if you will have a room to this time, and to hang yourself, and you will never be sorry for this step".
If Shakespear meaned bachelors are merry in the daytime and sad in the night? I doubt.
Shakespeare’s actual quote, from ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, spoken by Beatrice is
“…away to Saint Peter. For the heavens, he shows me where the bachelors sit, and there live we as merry as the day is long.”
Beatrice says the devil will tell her that Hell is no place for virgins and send her to heaven, where Saint Peter will meet her and show her where the unmarried people sit and she (as an unmarried person) will happily sit with them all day long.
To me, there are two ways to view any circumstance: optimistically or pessimistically.
To me, the notion of realism is a smug one; who can be sure what is real?
When someone says, “I am a realist,” my reaction is to think that the person is actually a pessimist. In my experience it is the “realists” who look down on dreams – the wings of optimism – and remind the dreamer that he should “get real”.
Imagine if everyone were a realist/pessimist; who would have come up with our medical, technological, artistic (etc.) breakthroughs?
The realist/pessimist caveman kills his meal with his bare hands, carries it home on his back, and eats it raw.
The optimistic caveman, through trial and error – always trying to better his lot – designs the arrow (with which he makes the kill), the wheel (which helps him get the food home), and figures out how to make fire (obvious benefits…).
The optimist dreams, and dreams beget advances. The realist/pessimist looks at a rock and sees… a rock.
The optimist is the one who takes on risk, starts a business, and creates jobs
The realist (er, mild pessimist) would start a business himself but doesn’t think he’d succeed. So he gets a job working for the optimist.
The true pessimist damns the lot and starts an Internet think-tank whose main purpose is to criticize entrepreneurs or any venture in general. “I/he/she/they can’t” is his most-used phrase.
I’m not sure if a human being can be categorized into optimist, realist and pessimist at all. There are people who tend to be more optimistic than others, but even they get disheartened in certain situations. Perhaps they just don’t admit it? And a so-called pessimist looks at things way more optimistically than even he or she realizes. It all depends on the circumstance, age, a person’s background and upbringing. Often depression is being confused for pessimism. A mildly depressed person acts like “a pessimist”.
P.S. I’m always surprised at how many bosses and entrepreneurs are such skeptics and still made it to the top, and how many “optimists” are not successful in life simply because they see everything through rose-colored glasses and therefore lose perception. Perhaps an optimist is doomed to be disappointed and a pessimist gets “pleasantly surprised”? A realist tries to see things both ways and weighs the odds. I think that’s what we all do, without noticing.
One can believes that all things happen for the best and good will triumph in the end
called optimism. I will say optimist will never get disappointed, even it happens so
they will not act as pessmist. Pessmist never think anything good and they are hopeless in everything. I want to be an optimist, I don’t believe in others opinion
that optimist will get disappointed whereas pessmist will enjoy that, when we
think everything in positive way, we don’t have to bother about pessimist.
Let us hope for the better and best so that we can shine in our life.
Certainly it comes in degrees and depends on circumstances… but I would maintain that the optimist is more likely to try something – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – than the cagey pessimist or the grounded “realist”. IE – the optimist is more prone to take risks.
No one can say that the optimist is more prone to take risk, to achieve their goal,
aim, target and so on, they can follow any method, it shows their ability, talent,
and tolerence. It is not depend on the circumstances but aiming higher hopes,
even if it is not done as per their choice, they will feel like to do better in future
and they will not bother about failure and disappointment.
Regarding optimism and pessimism opinion will differ from one person to
other person, but how far the people aware of this I don’t know…
I have not come here for arguement about this optimisum and pessimism
but what I knew only I wrote, since I am always optimist.
Young people, especially those right around the age of college pupils, think that they will earn less money than their parents but can be just as happy if not more so with their lives. An AP poll was recently conducted of people ages 18 to 24. The survey found that youngsters were saddled with greater debts and higher costs than their parents, however were highly optimistic about the future. Students optimistic about the future, despite expecting less cash would help them have greater insights on life. But, we just may end up with a lot more post grad degrees because of this recession.
And a so-called pessimist looks at things way more optimistically than even he or she realizes. It all depends on the circumstance, age, a person’s background and upbringing. Often depression is being confused for pessimism. A mildly depressed person acts like “a pessimist”.