Wanting to go back to sleep
Dear Gloria
what is the meaning of that elliptic sentence: "Why aren't you dancing the light fantastic?
The treasures I have poured upon you that you no longer notice. You may see the cracks in the sidewalk and be appalled at their condition. If you must attend to details, then attend to the beautiful dandelion that loves life so much it bursts through the sidewalk just as the sun bursts through the sky to light your path.
Why are you not kissing the Earth you walk on? Why aren’t you dancing the light fantastic? When did you learn to criticize more than to love? Do you want to be a critic or a lover?
No wonder you don’t want to get up in the morning when you consider Creation as less than the wonder it is. You are waiting for miracles to happen when you are stumbling over miracles right and left.
Beloved Normand, I believe
Beloved Normand, I believe that God here meant: "Why aren't you happy? Why aren't you dancing with joy?"
I looked up the phrase in Google. The actual phrase is "tripping the light fantastic." It comes from Shakespeare and others and more recently from a song called The Sidewalks of New York.
Does this help?
Yes Gloria, your paraphrase
Yes Gloria, your paraphrase does help. But I don't understand the syntax of that sentence: where do we hook "fantastic"? Is it an adjective, an adverb? What is it related to?
Dear Normand, I suspect that
Dear Normand, I suspect that fantastic cannot be translated -- just the gist of the sentence conveyed. Oh, I don't have the context in front of me now. Maybe Why aren't you dancing?could work. Does it?
¡Naturalmente, querida
¡Naturalmente, querida Gloria!
Enlightening read
Dearest Normand,
Just a little more info regarding the origins...
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-tri1.htm
Namaste,
Nancy
Thanks so much Nancy. I
Thanks so much Nancy.
I would never have guessed the structure of that phrase with the "missing toe". If it is hard to figure out for modern English speakers, imagine for foreigners!:
“Mrs. Crump sat in a little bar, profusely ornamented with pictures of the dancers of all ages, from Hillisberg, Rose, Parisot, who plied the light fantastic toe in 1805, down to the Sylphides of our day”. Later it was used in a truncated form without the final word. Losing that — as well as the ancient meaning of the first word and the original sense of fantastic — makes the whole saying more than a little obscure to us moderns.
I pushed the research a little more to discover that "to trip" with the meaning of dancing lightly comes from Old french "tripper, triper, treper" which means to walk or dance with light steps. The Old french "treper" comes itself from germanic *trippon. For "fantastic", we don't use the meaning of "fanciful or extravagant" anymore (or not very often). It comes from the Greek work "phantastikos" which means "to be able to create mental images, to appear".
And with that missing "toe", all that sentence was very cryptic.Now it makes more sense!