[Bookpossum]

I have just finished reading this book - what a terrific nomination sun surfer! I was very impressed by it, both the beautiful prose and the immense scholarship which underpinned the work.

The Penguin edition I read also contains Yourcenar's Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian and in it she writes of retaining only one sentence from an early draft of the book, which was one which I noted as both beautiful and profound:

Like a traveler sailing the Archipelago who sees the luminous mists lift toward evening, and little by little makes out the shore, I begin to discern the profile of my death. (page 16)

This one I also noted and appreciated for its wisdom:

... each of us has to choose, in the course of his brief life, between endless striving and wise resignation, between the delights of disorder and those of stability, between the Titan and the Olympian ... To choose between them, or to succeed, at last, in bringing them into accord. (page 121)

And a quote from Yourcenar's reflections on writing the book:

A human life cannot be graphed, whatever people may say, by two virtual perpendiculars, representing what a man believed himself to be and what he wished to be, plus a flat horizontal for what he actually was; rather, the diagram has to be composed of three curving lines, extended to infinity, ever meeting and ever diverging. (page 284)

A wise and beautiful book. I kept being reminded of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (the Mark for whom the memoirs are written), and I can't give higher praise than that. Here is a quote from Book 8 of the Meditations:

The first rule is, to keep an untroubled spirit; for all things must bow to Nature's law, and soon enough you must vanish into nothingness, like Hadrian and Augustus. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are, remembering that it is your duty to be a good man. Do without flinching what man's nature demands; say what seems to you most just - though with courtesy, modesty, and sincerity.