Surprise Us

I revel in finding disconcertingly unlikely passages in writers we think we understand. The failing is ours, not the writer’s, for when we think we know a writer well enough to predict how he will write, we have grown at once complacent and dictatorial. We have the audacity to cage a writer behind the bars of our understanding, and thus deny him the freedom to surprise us and to confound his expectations, and ours.

Who wrote the following, and in what work?

“I easily read the moral of my dream. Yesterday I was influenced with the rottenness of human relations. They appeared full of death and decay, and offended the nostrils. In the night I dreamed of delving amid the graves of the dead, and soiled my fingers with their rank mould. It was sanitarily, morally, and physically true.”

This passage has a different author. Who wrote it, and in what work?

“It was the world of cheerful commonplace and conscious gentility and prosperous density, a full-fed, material, insular world, a world of hideous florid plate and prosperous order and thin conversation. There was not a word said about Byron.”

The second is a trick question.