Quote:
Originally posted by LessinSF
You quoted them. And you wanted to have the opening to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas memorized, and few writers ever evoke that kind of response:
"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline,......
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I have some appreciation of the 20/20 hindsight longings of those too young to have been on the front lines of the cultural revolution for the libertine excess of that quote, but in a nod towards appreciating the timeless, I would take the following as the best first lines of a book:
"IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
Reading the latter reduces Thompson's writing to something that one might find on a bathroom stall, albeit the bathroom stall of an honors HS or that school from FAME or someplace like that.
Dickens represents eternal literary excellence, HST a free-spirited existentialist's POV from a brief moment in the sun. I admit to enjoying Uncle Duke's irreverant wit when I was a youth, but with each passing year I find myself turning back to the likes of Dickens in lieu of the incoherent drug-addled muses of my schoolboy days.
