I blame Kant

[Indefinite Description]

I have reservations about the later paragraphs, which could probably be seen as excessively angst-ridden and somewhat overwritten; currently I'm unsure what I might do to improve them, though.

Always the same salutation: how drab the room is; how surprised they are. Most of them exclaim it, and the rest obviously think it: how they expected opulence and artworks everywhere, to be treading on painstakingly tinted mosaic and bedazzled by perfectly proportioned furnishings. They're scrabbling for new stories in their heads, to explain this man of legendary cultivation and his chosen home.

My cell is a grey stone box, with a plain metal door: moss, rust and other accidental adornments are routinely eradicated. Light enters through one square window, too high to afford a view outside for any man, and the shadows do not make interesting patterns.

I tell them it's to blot out distractions, to permit my senses to absorb the fabulous sights they bring me with no discordant note from our surroundings. This usually satisfies, though every once in a while some visitor pushes further, convinced that the sage has a deeper secret, some profound aesthetic insight into a greater beauty than I'm ready to reveal.

The script is otherwise invariant: the most discerning minds (besides mine), the most sensitive palettes, the most discriminating eardrums clash in violent dispute, and at length the exasperated world has beaten a path to my door. One squabbling critic sees in a painting's small irregularities a finer grace bestowed upon the whole, another mere shoddy detraction; one judge discovers in the superhuman exploits of Ennevan a bold and aweome heroism, while another finds in the same epic merely the ridiculous. He alone can resolve the matter whom everyone acknowledges as the unchallenged master.

Rare and exquisite are so many things that pass before my eyes: the weirdly sculpted grave-goods of vanished peoples, or the nearly discarded scrawlings of the madmen in the clinics. When the magistrate Deyflor was set upon and drowned in the night, and in the morning eyes were set upon the bloated aftermath, influential thinkers had it that the pattern of the straggling weeds around his fleshy torso exhibited an evocatively primal rawness; and in due course the putrefying lump was brought beneath my nostrils. A schoolmistress and the entirety of Class Three have found themselves reading the morning register within my hearing; I hope I caused no serious setback for the career of 'Kinnek, Laghur' when I advised that only by his presence on the list was this recital distanced from perfect sweetness.

They leave again, and I stare blankly in the half-light where it spills in through my window, and hope that I shall notice no enthralling movements of the swirling dust motes. A day's exhibitions leave my senses exhausted. Later there will be bread and water, incandescent with loveliness upon my tongue; and in consuming them I will stand firm against their saporous allure.

The agonising overflow has been a lifelong risk for me, but it is not mere superabundant assault upon my most delicate of taste that burrows through my conscience. Mine is a sight that loves things it should not love; and within me things have fallen away that should seem most beautiful.

Flames in any city would have done: anybody's screams, and any creatures' blood. As I looked up from the sonnets of Ashel, I slipped from one reverie to another, and away from all that was close, and comforting, and particular: to my home and my kin I was knocked oblivious, madding in the sudden carnage, and at that same time looking happily on and enthralled by my own dissolution in the frenzied chaos. Inferno, wreckage, slaughter: how sublime they were as I knew them, not as the invasion of my people's lands, but as the tireless dance of a kaleidoscopic cosmos.

Sobriety returned at length, and it changed my companionship with beauty: though my shadow as always, never again might she have my confidence. The old delight was tainted, and I feared being dragged again to that godly nowhere with its views across hopeless distances. To avoid the risk I sought out the filthiest places, but I revelled in the panorama of their dirt; then I retreated to the plainest regions, great swathes of repetitive suburban horror, and yet even in their regimentation I found beauty.

It was partly inexperience that led to my second disaster, and partly a conviction that both the grasping attachment of sexual desire and the absolute particularity of a love that accepts no substitutes would keep us safe from that terrible window on the universal. It was indeed the particular eccentricities that I loved, and that I loved to see enlarge and blossom; until my insane love was dead by her own hand, still beautiful in her crumpled, cold perfection. And her beauty flooded into me through every pore in my sorrow, and on usurping command made even my sorrow a beguiling spectacle, until I turned away and inward, and cloistered myself within this cell.

Tomorrow I am to be brought a shopkeeper and a petty thief, who will re-enact a crime for my appraisal. Their custodian is young, I hear, and aquiring some renown as a poet after the style of Ashel. I shall be happier if he does not ask me many questions.

[Navarre]

Perhaps the penultimate paragraph is a tad melodramatic (also the bit about the bread) but otherwise I think it's good. Obviously it depends (as you yourself have written) on how you view it, but I think it would be difficult to depict the character's feelings without it seeming a little angsty.... perhaps more hints on the idea that he is trapped would also help add depth.

[Indefinite Description]

He isn't trapped in any physical sense; it's his 'chosen home'. If it's the word 'cell' that's making you think that, think monkishness (hence 'cloistered') rather than literal imprisonment. (Romeo and Juliet has a location called 'Friar Lawrence's Cell'.)

As the thread title hints (and the notes to the version on my blog make explicit), this is pretty openly inspired by certain philosophical work, and although it ought to be readable without knowing that (otherwise I wouldn't have posted it here) I'll be reluctant to downplay any of those elements. The bit with the bread is necessary, I think, to emphasise the sheer acuteness of sensory pleasure the narrator experiences, which makes the later developments seem less improbable.

I agree that the suicide is melodramatic; the question then is what to do with it, given that this isn't a realist work. Developing a fuller sense of a developing and declining relationship would require a veritable story-in-story, I think; I tried to avoid giving any vivid impression of the woman to begin with, so I could wheel her offstage quickly as just another moment—which arguably suits the narrator's disposition, i.e. he still remembers her aesthetically rather than really sympathetically, melodramatically rather than humanly. But it does come out rather abruptly...

EDIT: Looking more closely at why you might think the narrator's imprisioned, I'll grant that it's an interesting reading which the text doesn't do that much to contradict; but then you will find the bit with the bread jarring, because you're probably not picking up fully on what I added as suggestions that the man's senses were so painfully acute that he needed to avoid stimulating them much. There's at least one school of criticism which maintains that the author needn't know the meaning of his own text, so...

[Maruno]

I agree that the reference to the bread is slightly much. Perhaps even as little as one less adjective would be better? I think the fact that anyone and everyone longs to hear his opinions, and considers them the ultimate authority, shows well enough that his senses are very finely tuned and acute. The reader then gets the impression, from the protagonist seemingly complaining about all this attention, that he would prefer his senses not stimulated too much. In my opinion, then, the description of the bread is a little much for its purpose.

I don't see anything in particular wrong with the last few paragraphs. Whatever angst there is seems to be directed towards the loss of something aesthetically pleasing, rather than the loss of a loved one (if you understand my meaning), and I think that works fine here.

The reference to his "chosen home" right at the start almost explicitly states he is not trapped, physically, but as the protagonist keeps referring to it as his cell, we see that it is indeed some kind of restriction, imposed by the many people seeking his word. I get the very real sense that the protagonist would prefer less attention, and to be allowed to live, instead of justifying and defining everything else.

Having said all that, I will admit this style of writing is not something I enjoy too much. I dislike poetry (except for amusing limericks, of course, but I suppose they barely qualify), and tend not to like pages and pages of sheer description of every single aspect and evoked emotion caused by whatever the subject may be (a cathedral, a fruit salad, etc.). I prefer writing that always remembers it has a point to make, and is (nearly) always trying to make it. No meandering. But of course, that's just a personal preference.

[Indefinite Description]

Mmm... possibly 'incandescent with loveliness' is a little too much; but it does emphasise the sheer overwhelming degree of sensory pleasure obtainable, whereas the act of consultation emphasises quality of (disinterested) judgment.

The narrator doesn't actually say he simply dislikes stimulation in itself: he calls it exhausting, and overstimulation 'a lifelong risk', but his remark about his 'companionship with beauty, ... [his] shadow as always, [formerly in his] confidence' suggest, along with his apparently having experienced a 'reverie' through reading sonnets, that he has experienced beauty as basically pleasurable and is now repulsed by its 'tainted' nature for basically moral reasons rather than because it has ceased to be intrinsically pleasurable. Maybe I should have made him more conflicted.

Personally I prefer to be left to discover the/a point, rather than having one pointed out. De gustibus non disputandum est, except by appointment.

[Navarre]

I wasn't meaning that I felt he was trapped in the physical sense, and I'm well aware of the dual meaning of the word 'cell'. The 'monkish' meaning, as you put it, was actually the way I intepreted it the first time.

I was referring to the idea that he can seem to get away from beauty, anywhere he goes (the bit with the dirt and then the suburbs particularly). Maybe I was just misinterpeting it, but by the end that seemed to be a key point, that beauty was supposed to be this great thing but he couldn't truly appreciate it anymore. He briefly talks about how overstimulation is a lifelong risk, but that already seems, in my opinion, to have happened.

[Indefinite Description]

Fair enough; though the statement that 'it is not mere superabundant assault upon [his] most delicate of taste that burrows through [his] conscience' probably indicates it's not 'just' an excess of stimulation in itself. I think it ends up as an ethical question: the spectating distance of the aesthetic attitude as inimical to moral sensibility.

Sorry if I'm coming across as protective; I do appreciate the critiques, I'm just testing them thoroughly against the text.

[Navarre]

That's okay, I'm a bit testy when people comment on my work, even though their points are usually quite valid.

Mmm, I can see what you're talking what your talking about... but the idea of an ethical question would suggest he has an element of choice, whereas from his descriptions, it appears that that isn't always necessarily the case;

'still beautiful in her crumpled, cold perfection. And her beauty flooded into me through every pore in my sorrow, and on usurping command made even my sorrow a beguiling spectacle'

Bits like this... It's like he understands that death shouldn't be beautiful, but he can't quite help himself. I think in order to understand the moral implications of what he does, greater emphasis may need to be placed on his almost addiction-like relationship with beauty.

[Indefinite Description]

Well, he chooses to 'turn away and inward', so to that extent he retains autonomy. What he can't do is cease to perceive beauty, and although this isn't altogether explicit I think there's plausibly an element of being unable to avoid finding the experience pleasurable: addiction is one way of characterising that, but maybe it's more like the (again) monkish reaction to (normal levels of) carnal lust: the urge is a feature of one's own psyche that's experienced as a problem to be fought against precisely because it's pleasurable.

[Navarre]

Okay, I see where you're going with this now, that makes a lot more sense... like you say, it's not altogether explicit, so I guess it depends how much of a point you want to make of it.

[Mu-chan]

Umm... I'll first say, I'm not very good at understanding really complex stuff, so my view is mainly just reading it as it is, maybe taking some things a bit too literally or without as much attention as you would have preferred from the reader (like not fully understanding all parts). ^^

The content seems okay to me, but the delivery rather than the content, in the later paragraphs doesn't seem to flow completely consistant with the previous paragraphs IMO.

The 'Flames in any city would have done: anybody's screams, and any creatures' blood.' part seems a little too sudden change IMO from the previous sentence. I'm not sure if its because it seems a little too direct compared to the above or just the ordering seems strange to me, but the delivery doesn't really flow even though the subject itself flows.

The 'It was partly inexperience that led to my second disaster...' part stands out quite a lot IMO. Specifically saying 'my second disaster' makes it feel too separate IMO since it was all flowing together before then, building on each other, unless you were going for a big distinction here. The rest of that paragraph is fine I think, though '... my insane love was dead by her own hand...' is a little bit strange to me, having 'my' and 'her own' together when it almost seems like the person within the lover wasn't what he really loved, or something, but still okay. ^^;;

Overall, it's good. The style of speech is a little odd to me (like 'peoples'), but seems to work with the style as you bring it together. Just remember not to get too absorbed and start thinking like that for real! :V

EDIT: No problems with the bread part here, by the way. I thought it joined the sentences together quite well. ^^

[Indefinite Description]

I agree that the tone changes pretty sharply in the middle; maybe a little more early biographical detail would have smoothened that. Regarding the 'second disaster' bit, though, I just thought the narrator was distinguishing it from the destruction of the city, suggesting that these two disastrous events have made him what he is.

Worrying about my thinking like that for real? Do you mean the language or the predilection for deranged lovers...?

[Mu-chan]

I meant the seemingly unhealthy infatuation with beauty and need to satisfy it and the reclusive stuff in general if I understood things right~ ^^

It wasn't just the words 'second disaster' that made it stand out (I probably should have said 'especially' instead of 'specifically'~), but the sentence as a whole seemed like the start of a story which makes it stand out being where it is (perhaps using 'it was' to start the paragraph helped this?), and then the way it joins back the rest of the work at the end of the same paragraph made that part a little too distinct IMO... if that makes sense. ^^;;