Frustration

[flemmings]

Somewhere in this here journal I noted that the coda to Bede's story about the sparrow in the meadhall* was actually a passage from  a Russian short story by I think Gogol. Can't find it anywhere, can't think what else I might have tagged it with, cannot find it online, cannot find it.

Argh.

* "The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all." 

The coda is the oldest of the king's men saying 'Even in the dark the sparrow is not lost but knows her nest.'

ETA Ha! Ha! Ha! Found it, and it's Turgenev after all, Rudin:

"I remember a Scandinavian legend,' thus he concluded, ‘a king is sitting with his warriors round the fire in a long dark barn. It was night and winter. Suddenly a little bird flew in at the open door and flew out again at the other. The king spoke and said that this bird is like man in the world; it flew in from darkness and out again into darkness, and was not long in the warmth and light. . . . 'King,' replies the oldest of the warriors, 'even in the dark the bird is not lost, but finds her nest.' Even so our life is short and worthless; but all that is great is accomplished through men. The consciousness of being the instrument of these higher powers ought to outweigh all other joys for man; even in death he finds his life, his nest.’"

Comments

[kore]

That's such a great quote. I know nothing about a Gogol story though!

[flemmings]

I'm not even sure it's Gogol, he just seems the likeliest of the Russian writers to have written it.

[anna_wing]

And the late, great, children's novelist Diana Wynne Jones referred to it casually in a song in her novel, "Cart and Cwidder", but pointed out there that "the bird's life is not the man's life", which now that I think of it had to have been entirely deliberate in the context of the novel (Jones didn't do that sort of thing accidentally).

[flemmings]

Oh neat! I didn't notice that when I last reread C&C, which was only a few years ago. Will look at it again. Thanks.

[anna_wing]

It's a little poem. "The Adon's hall was open. Through it, swallows darted. The soul flies through life. Osfameron in his mind's eye knew it. The bird's life is not the man's life."

[flemmings]

That's amazing that you can remember the very passage. DWJ for me is the ultimate 'there while I'm reading, gone the minute after' writer. I can't now find even when it was I last read the Dalemark quartet. Thought it was year before last but no...

[anna_wing]

I remember the first line, and the last, and DuckDuckGo was my friend!

I read 'Cart and Cwidder' very young, and made up tunes for all the songs in it! A lot of the additional depths in the story were beyond me then, of course, but that line, "the bird's life is not the man's life" stuck, and the whole song acquired new meaning when I learned about that story of the bird flying through the hall.

And of course, a lot of her stories involved the general undesirability of letting yourself be made the instrument of higher (or at least, bigger) powers....