You know how I always said bring him home should not be in les mis, and it is not canon? I mean, it just occurred to me that even though Valjean didn’t save Marius at that time, he did eventually, and he even blessed Cosette and Marius’ marriage despite his unwillingness to do so, going so far as to proclaim his life’s work ended. And he saved Javert at that time, a far greater fear of his own (or was it that his love for Cosette surpassed that fear for his own imprisonment), showing how he has always been about love and redemption. It made me think, and I realise the tone of bring him home has never been wrong. You change some things and shift some timeframes in adaptations, and who am I to complain about one of the best numbers of this masterpiece?
(I didn’t get bring him home that much at the start. But someone close passed away, I looped it, and yeah, at times like those you suddenly see what the song is really about, and it’s beautiful.)
And when JVJ really sings it at the ending, it is so true to the story.
And same goes for the do you hear the people sing reprise at the finale. Because Victor Hugo wanted to write about fading into nihility. He wanted to write about death, about how lives don’t matter a hundred years down the road. Revolutions fade, compassion and genuine love and forgiveness reigns. But he wrote this in the 1850s, in the wake of France's 1848 revolution mess and he himself in self-imposed exile, the glaring failure of the second republic and the irony of napoleon III’s ascension shoved in his face. So he’s disillusioned with uprisings. He wants peace. But above all he still longs for liberty and egalite—at that point in the course of history we don’t even know if he still believes in the possibility of such a future. So instead Hugo writes about the fading of things, he writes about religion and he writes about love and compassion, he chooses to end the story with the fading life of Jean Valjean rather than the conviction of liberty of the ABC’s.
Despite all this, for just a little or a lot, in the heaven faraway and some time in their near future, for at least a brief respite of time, the chorus rings of a la volonte du peuple, and I suppose it will be what he wished for.
The musical is pretty congruent, all things considered.
(recommendation of the day: I was listening to Chris Jacobsen's BHH which made me write all this. So blame him.)
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
moral obligations yeah but also no I was rereading jean valjean's internal dialogue scene on his way to Arras (if I speak, I am condemned / if I stay silent, I am damned) and yes it is about the factory workers and the people of Montreuil-sur-Mer, it is about "my soul belongs to God I know, I made that bargain long ago", by faith of consequentialism if I could save the lives of a hundred people over one wretched man who is not going to do so, of course I would not condemn myself to life in gaol.
but also no.
he did not freaking want to go to the trial. All his way to Arras by horse he was pulling a Jarndyce and acting fricking like, "the wind blows, ergo Providence decrees I am not to go to Arras". "The court is full and everyone believed in the miserable convicted man. Of course I should just turn back and leave." All the time his heart was literally going "okay I'm just going to get there, take a look, everything's fine and dandy and I'll be headed my way back Montreuil-sur-Mer".
and that's almost what he did. He got there, shoved his mayor alias at the judge and got a first-class seat at the court treated with nothing but reverence, every one of his former inmates condemned the falsely tried man without a shadow of doubt, then, dang, jean valjean looked at the wretched guy confused and miserable at the front, and went,
"I cannot actually let him go to jail for life for a crime and more petty crimes he has not a single clue about. I just can't."
et voilà there he goes he stands up and calls all attention to him; he reveals himself to the world by spilling arbitrary secrets about his inmates and shocking the hall to silence and fervour. he walks away before anyone arrests him, says, "you know where to find me" and heads home.
It was never about saving one life vs. a hundred, about being righteous and doing what was honourable. He was dreadfully fearful of the incarceration that loomed ahead; at that moment before the wrongly accused man he simply realised he could not go on.
the crowd oohs and aahs, they epitomise disbelief, in three days they forget about him and dear old Monsieur Madeleine was but an unrepentant bonapartist, a convict and a thief most deservedly rearrested.
Montreuil-sur-Mer topples in weeks. Many years later at his death, Jean Valjean leaves something on his grave, but that, too, fades away.
the other reason for his confession: and must my name until i die / be no more than an alibi
LotR is not about Frodo—and that makes it beautiful.
Fellowship is about the fellowship. All nine of them. Then they break, and Two Towers is about Minas Morgul and Isengard, which gives us Frodo and an increasing amount of Sam; Isengard on Merry, Pippin and Treebeard (ents!) then later the rest of the troop; Returning of the King is Aragorn. The Lord of the Rings is, well, Sauron.
None of the titles is about Frodo.
At some point the narrative delves into everything but Hobbits, and the book ends with Sam.
Fellowship had me loving Frodo, from Book 1 on, and Aragorn and Gandalf. In the Two Towers and at the ending of Fellowship I loved Gimli and Legolas; Merry and Pippin were kind of, inadequate and woefully unprepared. Sam and Smeagol deserve a mention. In Book 5 Meriadoc and Peregrin I truly loved, and in Book 6 no more could be said of Sam Gamgee—then in the end all of them, Frodo and Aragorn, Bilbo and Gandalf and Galadriel, Elrond as they sail across setting sun to the ainur's musics of the West. Sam turns back, and he is with Rose and their young Elanor. Aragorn with Arwen rules Arnor and Gondor; Gimli and Legolas on their wild travels and Merry and Pippin on theirs. It’s a journey through and through, and in the end you fall in love all of them (Smeagol being the cutest name (i'm sorry fight me)); usually I just delve deep into fandoms with one single character but Tolkien makes them work, breathes life into all of them.
omg this took so long i'll proofread in the morning. written in chinese originally, under "read more". annotations on [google docs] with translations to come because there are too many.
(if you do chinese, skip to the cut! it is way better than the translation cri.)
⟶ tl;dr summary
it is fortunate that their ship name is coined Hualian and not Hua-xie. The flower withers, the petals fall. Yet there is a time for blossoms, a time for withers — if huaxie it really is, still it is befitting of their eight hundred years of separations and reencounters.
仙花垂憐，川城傾謝。
Heavenly flowers empathise and shed mercy; entire rivers and cities bow down in gratitude.
身在無間，心在桃源。
Whence the body dwells incessant the heart thrives beyond, content.
o n e .
He was pierced by a hundred swords. Thereafter, he offered to be pierced again. The nightly terrors that prowl wild in his dreams: he was ready to embrace it once more. The heart pierces, and yet it trembles.
t w o.
A thought experiment: if Wuming didn't die for Xie Lian at the rematerialisation of the hundred swords, would Xie Lian have accepted his second ascension?
The world is a wretched sea. Mortals, misery. Some people carry with them the weight of conscience, atlas or abyss on their shoulders as they edge stepwise towards the heavenly skies, for they know that the higher they go, the more power they wield in their hands to change the course of the stars. Lin Shu stands on the shoulders of legacy and demarcates Conscience on the ground. He steps into the encirclement he has carved: he holds himself hostage and falls into the nether realms of the incessant inferno, subject to an unyielding pursuit for bygone honours and nobility in store. It takes courage, to live like this.
But it also takes another kind of courage, to not live like this. Xie Lian wasn’t like Lin Shu. Dethroned, mortalised, buried and stripped of power and grace, he wandered on earth for eight hundred years. He did not save the destitute mortals, desolate and crying for help. He did not bestow on them the bountiful blessings, as what a god could do. The did-not-do’s — it takes in another courage to be him.
t h r e e.
Had Xie Lian really collected scraps these eight hundred years? To deny would do his memoir a disservice, but there is more to that. He served as the high priest of a kingdom, a general to an army; on the grapevine, the crown prince in white had played many roles on the stage of life, a hundred years here in the role of one, and a hundred from forth in the robes of another. In time, the tales of the one who inspired rose and ebbed, yet the legacies remain. He didn’t protect the people with his deified status, yet what endures is his compassion and mercy. In the rain, the figure clad in white walks past the world in joy and tears and touches the hearts he passes — this was his salvation, and his ascension to godhood.
f o u r.
At his second banishment, Xie Lian implores Jun Wu to assuage him of his merit and luck. Mortals light incense in exchange for blessings in supplication. Xie Lian disperses Fortune to earth instead, and disassembles Divinity for the common people to carve out blessings of their own lives.
The works of one cannot salvage the teetering constructs of a foundering world. The world is a tapestry of woven histories; people save the people as the tales unfurl. The stitches tangling in a sea of light, blessed faces lit up in the night by the millions of lanterns adorning the households of the earth, keeping it bright as stars in the sky. And it was so, what Xie Lian and Hua Cheng did.
f i v e.
The sword nears his neck: he is unfazed. The tenderness and gentleness of the noble spirit endures, staid as the meekness of nephrite jade. In the vicissitudes of temperaments, he sits, blasé; he does not concern himself with the triumphs and setbacks of life.
Clouds and storms wash across the world as he continues, with eased smiles and casual dialogue.
It is the most pitiable thing, of all in the world, gazing upon one who smiles placid in face of abject misery. He laughs in his affliction, yet is there such a thing, to be okay in utter wretchedness?
Fleeting moments of forlornness and joy all condensed in the time of a single gaze: his experiences refine him into a jade of the heart. The days of the ingenuous youth awash in ages past, gone were the luckiest teen of the kingdom, but the pureness in the eyes behind the sheaths of pain remain.
— I’m used to it, it matters no more;
who is there in this race with him but the immutable laws of nature in the crescent moon and wind?
The splendour surges, the crowds fete, the splendour falls — in the desert there is none: there is no glass of water waiting at your salvation. Dust and silt fork at each’s turn of fate; flies shovel across the path towards their better destinies. So long as one has feelings, has desires, how could one be truly free? The flower remains. The vista is unchanged. Yet the splendorous tower — the radiant memories of the past — bygones — and still he says that although the body dwells incessant, the heart thrives content. Where, pray, is the fount of the utopian peach blossom? How so, that the heart is at peace, in face of all this?
Yet he is well. His heart at peace. Where the heart lies, the peach blossoms spring.
+ 1
Xie Lian is this person, as such. Though the spring of the peach blossoms have long since dwindled, he hopes, towards.
Full annotations found here. Untranslated for now because there are simply too many; I suggest copying and pasting into the browser if you are interested in the poetry and verses cited. Many of them are not used as per their original meaning, however, so it is 99% on me if you caught the reference but did not understand it.
Anyhow, a note on the two most important allusions, because there is value in such:
[1] 身在无间，心在桃源。Whence the body dwells incessant, the heart thrives beyond, content.
A suggested translation of "Body in abyss, heart in paradise" because I vehemently abhor the official tl.
Incessant hints to the nirvana of buddhism. I didn't play with the idea of using paradise like in John Milton's poem to encapsulate the utopian ideals of Jin dynasty Tao Yuanming's Taoist Peach Blossom Spring visions. In Tao's essay he expresses the notion "I can live in a peaceful provincial paradise where the peach blossoms spring and forget about worldly matters", which is not exactly the biblical Eden. Probably owing to the idea that Xie Lian never actively sought out an extraterrestrial, heavenly, peach-blossom-spring paradise, I did not translate it literally here but figuratively, though opinion probably divides on this one.
[2] 纵武陵人远，烟锁秦楼。
念武陵人远，烟锁秦楼。——《凤凰台上忆吹箫·香冷金猊》 李清照
李氏取自：
烟锁凤楼无限事，茫茫，鸾镜鸳衾两断肠。——《南乡子·细雨湿流光》 冯延巳
Extreme liberties taken. Li Qingzhao wrote the first poem from the perspective of a lover. She sits at her own chambers reminiscing about her lost lover. This in turn was alluding to Feng Yansi's poem. Both works reference a tower/chamber where two mythical lovers spent their time at before ascension. As such, this phrase denotes here something unattainable from past memories and someone locked in perpetuum, in stasis, waiting for something to come.
In relation to this line on the chamber/tower by Li Qingzhao, a direct allusion to Tao Yuanming's peach blossom utopia was also alluded to in Li's poem in the antecedent line, despite both being used to speak of romance and not sociopolitical utopian ideals. The sleep-deprived me thus thought it "apt" to cite both lines in the writing to express Xie Lian's longing for the peach blossom paradise, despite said paradise being no longer extant on Earth, and him being in incessant hell. The peach blossoms in question tie in with mxtx's allusion of the peach blossom spring in tgcf's famous quotation; thus explains the reason for all the convoluted quoting.
this much for now. I hope something makes sense, at least. The english version is very, very figurative since I realised the chinese version was nigh impossible to literally translate without dedicating a relatively great amount of time to it. I don't know how this will be received at all, but why hi, and hope it is something at least xD
Okay please read "Notre Dame des Lorettes" by @catcorsair for an interpretation of Erik as the "last defender on the barricade at the Rue Ramponeau" during the 1871 Paris commune,
then have the masked man ascend from the sewers and pass on the olympic torch to the final torchbearers at the Trocadero, give a nod, walk away, disappear into the night and never appear again -- we need a fic on this quick.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
i thought people immerse into every book, but am I mistaken? because there's this moment where everything clicks, and real life fades away. the words are no longer words on the page, you skip some and skim some but the story moves through you as you read, and it's the book that sets the pacing, no longer you. I don't have a vivid imagination, a picture never arises, but for certain I know those moments when everything falls away and it's just you and the book, characters and your surfacing emotions.
Without which I think even nonfiction I couldn't finish.
he's like the son I might have known
bring him peace / bring him joy / he is young / he is only a boy
if I die, let me die / let him live / bring him home
and then schönberg had to reprise it in the finale, with jean valjean singing it not for marius but for himself:
take me now to thy care / bring me home
and then the tears irresistibly come?? and then there's the reprise of On my own:
take my hand, and lead me to salvation
take my love, for love is everlasting
and remember, the truth that once was spoken / to love another person is to see the face of God
and after that of course they had to shift into the most notable song of all, reprising Do you hear the people sing with the most gorgeous lyrics:
do you hear the people sing / lost in the valley of the night
it is the music of a people who are climbing to the light
the les mis musical reuses so many motifs, even more so than hamilton and phantom, sometimes i take it in without bothering to understand why the choice was made, but the finale, the finale, it literally takes some of its best tearjerkers and gifts it some of the most beautiful, melancholic lyrics in the whole of the musical; in this manner we sit till the end of les miserables and how would all these emotions not come to us?
Alright, so jvj's sudden intense self-deprecation towards the end of part five has always eluded me. Where did that come from? Hadn’t he already turned over a new leaf with the bishop and with Cosette?
Les mis has many themes, but if we cast aside all the themes focusing on french insurgencies and her destitute people, abstract grace and love and Poverty and Progress, at the heart of the brick we find her characters: to look at Valjean, perhaps there are two things that explain his abject self-deprecation and wretchedness/misery which were so pivotal to his last chapters in the book and central to his overarching character.
(below has absolutely no regard for spoilers. proceed with caution, thanks)
I. Masks and veneers.
It is my sorry fate that, only ever able to command respect that is fraudulently obtained, that respect humiliates me and inwardly oppresses me, and if I’m to have any self-respect others must despise me.
cough erik poto
As patently stated in his final ruminations, JVJ never considered himself successful. Everything he did which he was respected and lauded for, it was attributed to masquerades of himself, Monsieur Madeleine and Fauchelevent. As Valjean, he never achieved anything of worth. He was terrified in his first days in paris hiding from javert's pursuit and finding the convent; he never felt anything of worth as valjean but a criminal and convict pursued for the entirety of his life.
Throughout the book, he lived a struggle between accepting valjean and donning another disguise that would be some other benevolent man: the extensive deliberations on his way to Arras (who am I?), his timidity after Cosette's marriage in which he deemed his work done — either he is to don a new identity or resume the one he hid away for the many past years; towards the end, as Cosette and Marius were increasingly besotted with each other, he withdrew, letting Javert arrest him again under conditions — he resigned to the resumption of his fugitive identity.
In all these years, his convicted past loomed unfailingly over him, especially considering his canonical rearrest after Fantine’s death — in spite of all the good he did in the world, he was never, in essence, a free man of his mind.
Which brings us to our second point.
II. Jacob's wrestle
The terrible struggle of old, of which we have already seen several phases, began once more. Jacob wrestled with the angel for only one night. Alas! how many times have we seen Jean Valjean forced to grapple with his conscience in the dark, and struggling frantically against it!
The bring him home reprise in the finale was so poignant, even more so than the original number, because of what it truly meant to Valjean in the book. The musical "redeemed" many characters by painting them in a better light: Javert, with his misguided understanding of religion vs. reading the law as bible; Eponine, with her scream saving jvj's household at Rue Plumet. As for jvj, his many wrestles with faith were downplayed for the sake of simplification, going as far as to him praying earnestly for Marius’ life at the barricades in the musical when in the book, let’s face it, he was physically saving Marius but in his mind he probably didn't understand why he was doing something so foolish.
Predestined fates do not all follow a direct route. They do not run straight before the one who is predestined. They have dead ends, blind alleys, obscure turnings, daunting crossroads offering several alternative routes.
And so with the musical where all these mental struggles were downplayed, in the book he wrestled with the faith he had chosen: first during his torturously slow tread to Arras (who am I?), then with his ruminations on Marius (akin to heart full of love reprise), and finally with his last confession to Marius — so many times had he struggled; there's the idea that God redeemed him through the bishop, and he did good as a man — yet why still, had his life been so torturous and so full of agony? At first I questioned the use of the title “the miserables/the wretched” — for les amis de l’ABC, the destitute people of the republic, I could see their wretchedness — but Valjean, why was the title so unfitting of the main character? But no. Internally he was wretched, he was pitiable and miserable, and in the aura of his bring him home we forget about his moments of wrath flung out about his faith and life philosophy, blunt anger at the injustice not of the world but of how his life had been — unredeemed, in spite of; the arrant, incomprehensible fear of being pursued and hunted, the resignation to his fate at the very end: moments at the sewers, before javert and before the loving newlyweds.
As such so profound it is, towards his final moments in the musical he reprises “God on high” and prays to bring himself home. He yields to the things in life he doesn’t like and defers to God’s judgement, the faith he has followed on and the bargain he has made so many long years ago — it was not at Arras that his soul truly belonged to God, it was at these final moments where he prays that he has lived his faith through — and that was when I felt jvj’s character fully liberated.
It was a starless night and extremely dark. No doubt, in the shadows, some immense angel stood with wings outspread, awaiting his soul.
---
oops this has gone on for way too long but i was itching to dissect jvj and have put it off for so long since reading the book i just had to do it for myself anyway.
Also living for all the nonexistent COMC Edmond Dantes and JVJ crossovers because discounting the timeline they share too many similarities in knowledge acquisition imprisonment and faith and pretences to not have met and had many an interesting tete-a-tete.
*quotes taken from christine donougher's translation. explains my tendency to use wretched over miserable lol.
