Long Day's Journey....

American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature, Eugene O'Neill grew up down the street

 325 Pequot Ave,New London CT

"Beguiling ne'er-do-well, with a strain of the sentimentally poetic" James "Jamie" Jr. – 33 years old, the older son. 

"...Connected with the sea...I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and signing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself -- actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky!" Edmund *with alcoholic talkativeness

Derisively: in a manner expressing contempt or ridicule.

Eugene O'Neill's boyhood home is just a few house down the street from where we live "

 "Fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost." p. 156

Garrulous: excessively talkative, especially on trivial matters p. 53

Happy Birthday banner at the childhood home of Eugene O'Neill

"I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life,  or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way." p. 156

"Joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams!"

“Know it's useless to talk. But sometimes I feel so lonely.”

Long Day's Journey into Night

 

“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” ~

Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night 

O'Neill posthumously received the 1957

Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Long Day's Journey into Night

Quinine plant cure malarial fever. P. 27

Read during week of O'Neill's birthday 

Stage directions* are "extraordinarily effective " ~ Harold Bloom p. viii

 

"...Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!"*[Edmund] grins wryly.

"Until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” ~ Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night

Vituperative: bitter and abusive."the criticism soon turned into a vituperative attack"

"What is it I'm looking for? I know it's something I lost... Something I miss terribly. It can't be lost altogether... Something I need terribly. I remember when I had it I was never lonely nor afraid. I can't have lost it forever,  I would die if I thought that. Because then there would be no hope." Mary  pp. 175-177

"...eXperience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like a veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see -- and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!
“Yes, facts don't mean a thing, do they? What you want to believe, that's the only truth!”

Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night

Zen-like to me: