Have you read with a partner? Cuddling, each reading their own book or both reading the same book.What was that like and what are fitting books for such exercise?
>>24971837>On a typical evening at Tribschen Wagner and his wife ask, when the children are asleep, what book they should read together. Plato? Not yet bound. Schiller? Read him recently. Calderon? Shakespeare? Homer? 'We decide,' Cosima writes, 'on the last.' (I'm pleased at that, for Homer is far and away my favourite reading.) 'Most wonderful impression,' Cosima writes, 'a sublimely intimate evening, indelible images stamped on my mind. Untroubled sleep.'>In the next day's entry she writes, 'The evening [is] crowned with four cantos from the Odyssey (Calypso, Nausicaa, Leucothea). Only distraction during the reading is watching R[ichard]'s fine, radiant counternance and delighting in the sound of his voice.' And on successive evenings she writes, about subsequent books of the Odyssey, 'Great delight ... The splendid happenings seem like a dream picture to me ... [Richard's] voice and his manner encompass the immortal work like music.>One day, over lunch, Wagner rates Plato's Symposium above all other literary works: 'In Shakespeare we see Nature as it is, here we have the artistic awareness of the benefactor added; what would the world know about redeeming beauty without Plato?'>One night they decide that there are seven great books. 'Over supper we discussed our indispensables and classified them thus: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato's Symposium, Cervantes Don Quixote, the whole of Shakespeare, and Goethe's Faust.' (Dante likely being forgotten rather than ignored)>The theatre at Bayreuth is opened, and they move into Wahnfried, the house Wagner designed there for himself. Properly married at last, they now have a library of over two thousand books to choose from for their evening reading. They make their way through several books of Thucydides together. Wagner wants to contrast German politics with those of classical Greece. 'Ah, they were too intelligent, those fellows,' he says of the Athenians. 'They could not last.' One day Cosima finds him reading Sophocles Oedipus and checking the translation against the original Greek. 'It is a torrent of beauty,' he says, 'now vanished forever: we are barbarians.'>A son is born, and they draw up plans for his future reading. Philosophy: Schopenhauer. Religion: Eckhart, Tauler. Art: R. Wagner. And then, much the same great-books program as before, climaxing in the big three - Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles.
>>24971844>There is something touching, finally, about the older, thoroughly domesticated couple, in an age before television, setting down again to read the Odyssey - she listening, as Penelope once did, and he reading the tale, as Odysseus once told it to his wife. He reads, she says, 'in so sublimely moving a way that I shed tears.' He concludes that Homer 'really was the poetic par excellence, the source of all poetic art, the true creator,' (He's right, as usual, in aesthetic matters.) In his last year, they return to Book 10, to the magical description of Circe's island, and the appearance of Hermes there. When they lay the book aside, he says, 'How sublime it is.'
I read stoker's vampiric novel out loud to a girl from my class as we cuddled together on the library couch. she could barely understand the prose as it was, and of no help was the relatively dryness of the first few chapters. The situation all the more acute when she decided she wanted to take over reading. She could barely pronounce a shocking amount of words, such as "voluptuousness," "imperious," and "preternatural." Much beyond proper pronunciation, it was clear as she read that she was in that flow state of reading (whether out loud or in your head) in which the words arrive at their proper cadence, but the understanding of their composite meaning is lost completely. Her body was very soft and warm althoughsoeverbeit.
>>24971887stop it. it hurts.
>>24971900Take no heed of my actions. Carnal desire is spark to the dry tinder of the human heart. Despite what the temporarily embarrassed socî malorum will tell you, it is not better to have loved and lost, as the hole that is opened only grows.
>>24971900god i miss the 80s
Not a fan. I need no distractions while I’m reading and i can’t listen to another person breath near me. I also don’t think i like physical contact so that could be an issue
>>24971837i read "stranger in a strange land" aloud to a girl in her bed. she described it as "bucolic" and ghosted ne a frw weeks later.
