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Phantastes a Faerie Romance for Men and Women by George MacDonald
You are more likely to experience Fairy Land when on a quest. So let’s begin. The trees are all around. The White Fairy is waiting in a marble castle. Strange occurrences in dreamy forest landscapes.
You find yourself on a moonlit precipice.
Be certain that Fairy Land is only a step away. The trees are people. You must judge them by their fruits. Your shadow will not go with you on this adventure.
THIS IS FAIRY LAND. DO NOT LET THE WITCHES AND WARLOCKS GET YOU.
My highlights:
Phantastes a Faerie Romance for Men and Women by George MacDonald
Book last read: 2022-01-31 19:14:21
Percentage read: 100%
Chapter 2:
Chapter progress: 8.56%
Highlight: Tis but a disguised humanity. To avoid thy fellow, vain thy plan; All that interests a man, is man.”
Chapter 2:
Chapter progress: 12.3%
Highlight: Whether all the flowers have fairies, I cannot determine, any more than I can be sure whether all men and women have souls.
Chapter 6:
Chapter progress: 31.02%
Highlight: Because I have heard, that, for those who enter Fairy Land, there is no way of going back. They must go on, and go through it. How, I do not in the least know.”
Notes: Endure to the end
Chapter 7:
Chapter progress: 32.09%
Highlight: Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of painfill thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill.
Chapter 8:
Chapter progress: 35.29%
Highlight: I need his aid to disenchant the things around me. He does away with all appearances, and shows me things in their true colour and form. And I am not one to be fooled with the vanities of the common crowd. I will not see beauty where there is none. I will dare to behold things as they are. And if I live in a waste instead of a paradise, I will live knowing where I live.
Notes: Shadow work
Chapter 9:
Chapter progress: 37.97%
Highlight: I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.
Notes: Good “mourning”.
Chapter 9:
Chapter progress: 37.97%
Highlight: and, moreover, as I was in Fairy Land where one does very much as he pleases,
Chapter 9:
Chapter progress: 38.5%
Highlight: All mirrors are magic mirrors.
Chapter 9:
Chapter progress: 39.04%
Highlight: As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note.
Chapter 9:
Chapter progress: 39.57%
Highlight: According to my custom since I entered Fairy Land, of taking for a guide whatever I first found moving in any direction, I followed the stream from the basin of the fountain.
Chapter 9:
Chapter progress: 40.11%
Highlight: Since my visit to the Church of Darkness, my power of seeing the fairies of the higher orders had gradually diminished, until it had almost ceased.
Chapter 12:
Chapter progress: 48.13%
Highlight: Cornelius Agrippa,
Chapter 12:
Chapter progress: 49.2%
Highlight: Some one form must sooner or later step within the charmed circle, enter the house of life, and compel the bewildered magician to kneel and worship.
Chapter 12:
Chapter progress: 50.27%
Highlight: But is it not rather that art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose every-day life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning?
Chapter 12:
Chapter progress: 50.8%
Highlight: She lay with closed eyes, whence two large tears were just welling from beneath the veiling lids; still as death, save for the convulsive motion of her bosom.
Chapter 15:
Chapter progress: 64.17%
Highlight: Only because uplifted in song, was I able to endure the blaze of the dawn.
Chapter 16:
Chapter progress: 65.78%
Highlight: Kobolds.
Notes: German goblin
Chapter 16:
Chapter progress: 65.78%
Highlight: You are so big, you keep the sun from us. We can’t see for you, and we’re so cold.
Notes: Bill Gates
Chapter 16:
Chapter progress: 66.31%
Highlight: They could not materially injure me, although they cut me on the head and face.
Notes: Evil spirits and demons
Chapter 17:
Chapter progress: 68.98%
Highlight: The life within me is yet enough to bear me up to the face of Death, and then I die unconquered.
Chapter 18:
Chapter progress: 74.87%
Highlight: There was something noble in him, but it was a nobleness of thought, and not of deed. He may yet perish of vile fear.
Chapter 19:
Chapter progress: 80.21%
Highlight: Tears are the only cure for weeping.
Chapter 19:
Chapter progress: 80.21%
Highlight: Rest is as needful as toil.
Chapter 19:
Chapter progress: 81.28%
Highlight: . I resolved however to work hard, and thus grow cool, and quick, and forceful.
Chapter 20:
Chapter progress: 83.96%
Highlight: As I stood exhausted amidst the dead, after the first worthy deed of my life, I suddenly looked behind me, and there lay the Shadow, black in the sunshine.
Chapter 20:
Chapter progress: 83.96%
Highlight: I was almost ashamed that I was alive, when they, the true-hearted, were no more. And yet I breathed freer to think that I had gone through the trial, and had not failed.
Notes: Living outside the matrix.
Chapter 21:
Chapter progress: 85.56%
Highlight: “Joy’s a subtil elf. I think man’s happiest when he forgets himself.” CYRIL TOURNEUR, The Revenger’s Tragedy.
Chapter 21:
Chapter progress: 85.56%
Highlight: Everywhere in Fairy Land forests are the places where one may most certainly expect adventures.
Chapter 21:
Chapter progress: 86.1%
Highlight: It looked as if scarce a tree had been cut down to make room for it.
Notes: Forest management
Chapter 21:
Chapter progress: 87.17%
Highlight: Oh, to be a child again, innocent, fearless, without shame or desire!
Chapter 21:
Chapter progress: 87.7%
Highlight: I dashed away the tears, ashamed of a weakness which I thought I had abandoned.
Chapter 21:
Chapter progress: 88.77%
Highlight: And wherever I go, my songs do good, and deliver people. And now I have delivered you, and I am so happy.
Notes: Holy Spirit
Chapter 21:
Chapter progress: 88.77%
Highlight: And wherever I go, my songs do good, and deliver people. And now I have delivered you, and I am so happy.”
Notes: Holy Spirit
Chapter 21:
Chapter progress: 89.3%
Highlight: Self will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is ever something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul:
Notes: Contrite spirit
Chapter 22:
Chapter progress: 91.44%
Highlight: Somehow or other,” said he, “notwithstanding the beauty of this country of Faerie, in which we are, there is much that is wrong in it. If there are great splendours, there are corresponding horrors; heights and depths; beautiful women and awful fiends; noble men and weaklings. All a man has to do, is to better what he can. And if he will settle it with himself, that even renown and success are in themselves of no great value, and be content to be defeated, if so be that the fault is not his; and so go to his work with a cool brain and a strong will, he will get it done; and fare none the worse in the end, that he was not burdened with provision and precaution.”
Notes: On how to be a man.
Chapter 22:
Chapter progress: 92.51%
Highlight: You see this Fairy Land is full of oddities and all sorts of incredibly ridiculous things, which a man is compelled to meet and treat as real existences, although all the time he feels foolish for doing so.
Notes: Fake everything
Chapter 22:
Chapter progress: 95.19%
Highlight: I could not tell how far he might be led to countenance, and otherwise support their doings, before he should find cause to repent bitterly of his error.
Notes: Bill Gates
Chapter 23:
Chapter progress: 97.33%
Highlight: It carried its rose-hue within; for now I could love without needing to be loved again.
Chapter 23:
Chapter progress: 97.33%
Highlight: Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad.
Chapter 23:
Chapter progress: 97.33%
Highlight: My floating chariot bore me over a great city.
Notes: Swing low
Chapter 24:
Chapter progress: 98.93%
Highlight: Could I translate the experience of my travels there, into common life? This was the question. Or must I live it all over again, and learn it all over again, in the other forms that belong to the world of men, whose experience yet runs parallel to that of Fairy Land? These questions I cannot answer yet.
Notes: Living loop
Chapter 24:
Chapter progress: 99.47%
Highlight: May the world be brighter for me, at least in those portions of it, where my darkness falls not.
Notes: Obituary material