The Magician's Hidden Library Magic Words: A Dictionary

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MAGIC WORDS • Beetle juice "Sailors pronounce Betelgeuse 'Beetle juice' and so do I." -- Basil Bunting, quoted in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: 1800 to the Present, edited by Frank Kermode (197 ) • Beteiguex • Betelgeux • Betelgeuze • Betelguex In Literature: • "A man is a cup able to hold his gill of the moon and magic, and only to yearn for Betelgeuse. It is his glory and his ruin that he is so quickly filled, and must forever know hunger." -- Thomas Wolfe, O Lost (1929) • From Alan Watts, "Incantation of the Stars" (1971), Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown (1974): [T]he magician, his voice reverberating without echo in the dark imaginary dome, tells me the names of lights nearer home -- names whose strangeness to our tongue measures the far immensity of Aldebaran, bright horn of the Bull, Arcturus, the Plowman's spear, Betelgeuse and Rigel, the Hunter's jewels, Vega, playing the Lyre, and Deneb, head of the swan. • "He had a pull to the origin of things, the first day, the first man, the unknown sea, Betelgeuse, the buried continent. From passive places his imagination sprang a harpoon." -- Edward Said, "'All Interweavingly Working Together': Herman Melville's Moby Dick," The American Mystery (2000) Beyond Variations and Incantations: • Above and beyond • Great beyond In Literature: • "[H]is heart clenched with the beauty of that single magical word -- Beyond." -- Stephen Bowkett, Ice: A Frozen World (2001)
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