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11 novembre 2024 à 18:19:20
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Le Monde de L'Écriture » Encore plus loin dans l'écriture ! » Textes non francophones » The last of men's fire

Auteur Sujet: The last of men's fire  (Lu 1952 fois)

Hors ligne Félix

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The last of men's fire
« le: 20 mars 2024 à 13:45:53 »
     I had a nightmare last night. I dreamt of Europe set on fire by a single massive nuclear weapon. I woke up in the middle of nowhere, the place was a huge and flat field. The soil was harsh ground, and the whole air was filled by a strange and heavy yellow fog. It was terrifying. I was alone in an infinite-looking radiation hell. I could feel the toxic and putrid smell. I felt myself immersed in a thick haze far from everything. I could see the wandering ghouls of all the lost souls, standing with nothing. Their skin was ripped, and slashed. Their flesh was naked, their eyes empty of any consciousness— their look vanished in the void. I didn’t want to face them, they scared me, I felt threatened by their only presence. They were a few ones, scattered to melting in the horizon.

All Europe was nothing but this corrupted Venus-like landscape. No cities, no forests, nor any lakes, roads or plants. Everything was crushed. The only weak standing reliefs being the Alps flattened by the weight of the gases. Everything, from Spain to Belarus, was shattered, wiped off, completely annihilated. All this part of the world, an entire continent of a whole planet of the universe, entirely destroyed in the deadliest chaos of a single nuclear warhead—in the last, of men’s fire.
« Modifié: 05 avril 2024 à 12:27:18 par Félix »

Hors ligne Beglous

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Re : The last of men's fire
« Réponse #1 le: 04 mai 2024 à 14:12:20 »
Hi Felix,

Not so much of a crowd around here.

Well, that's quite an end of the world that you've depicted.

I like the way you started it which makes me think about "I had a dream".
Questionned about punctuation's choices that I find somewhat irrelevant, such as :
"The soil was harsh ground, and the whole air..."
"Their skin was ripped, and slashed"
"in the last, of men’s fire"

Also, I'm not sure about the emphasis on the emotion here. I mean, it's clear without saying that the narrator may be terrified by his nightmare, it is the all concept of a nightmare. So, sentences like "It was terrifying" or "I didn’t want to face them, they scared me, I felt threatened by their only presence" are, to me, unecessary in this context.

Otherwise, I like the chaos, the set of sensations to describe it. Pictures nicely written.

Also, I was wondering about the change of point of view.
The first paragraph could be the narrator's impressions of the surroundings, what he sees, how it impacts him. However, in the following paragraph, he has kind of a global vision on an entire continent. It sounds weird, not related to his own experience, as if he knew this thing from a long time ago. To me, something switches too drastically between those two paragraphs.
« Modifié: 05 mai 2024 à 15:16:04 par Beglous »

Hors ligne Félix

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Re : The last of men's fire
« Réponse #2 le: 07 mai 2024 à 18:29:00 »
Hi Belgous,

Thanks for this really precise answer.
I kind of imagined the text as something that could be told by a storyteller, so the punctuations are rather here to represent the breaks, or stops, during the speech.

The change of point of view between the two paragraphs is just because it is how I felt it. This is actually a nightmare I really had, and for once I didn't want to modify it when telling it, I really wanted to tell it the way I felt it, despite having a text less appealing. So this is sort of pure memory here  :mrgreen: , which here I considered as a priority to the quality of the text.

 


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