Laura
‰ЫПThe Venetian trip, contrary to the promises of Mark Members, had not renewed energies for writing. All the same, established priorities, personal continuities, the confused scheme of things making up everyday life, all revived, routines proceeding much as before. The Conference settled down in the mind as a kind of dream, one of those dreams laden with the stuff of real life, stopping just the right side of nightmare, yet leaving disturbing undercurrents to haunt the daytime, clogging sources of imagination ‰ЫУ whatever those may be ‰ЫУ causing their enigmatic flow to ooze more sluggishly than ever, periodically to cease entirely.‰Ыќ
—
I bought my set of Dance to the Music of Time online from a used book seller. Each of the twelve books is pocket-sized and cream-coloured (perhaps originally white), most in pretty good shape. Temporary Kings had at some point before arriving in my hands suffered water damage, enough to create a permanent wave in the pages which crackled when bent and refused to straighten. Unlike with most paperbacks, it felt good to bend back the cover while reading, giving the impression of improving the book‰ЫЄs physical state rather than abusing it because only then did the wave disappear. The edges of the pages showed where whatever liquid it was had soaked into the fibres, although the surface of the pages were not discoloured. It was a book I would have kept in my pocket if I‰ЫЄd had a pocket that was big enough to hold it. It felt like a book to read alone in a pub over a hot and savoury meal covered in gravy while it rained outside. Instead I began reading it immediately after finishing the preceding novel in the lounge at the airport in Singapore waiting for the flight to Frankfurt while my travel companion napped in the chair across from me; continued it in bed before going to sleep, on the bus in the morning dizzy with sleepiness, on the walks to and from bus stops on the way to school or home while the daylight lasted, and finally in the living room today while high winds blew all sorts of weather past our windows.
‰ЫПThe General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.‰Ыќ
—
“Neat, sad, geared perfectly in outward appearance to the sombre nature of the occasion, Tolland stood, head slightly bent, gazing at the damp grass beneath his feet. He had once admitted to having travelled as far as Singapore. One wondered how he had ever managed to get there and back again.”
‰ЫПAs I uttered the last letter, scales fell from my eyes. Everything was transformed. It all came back ‰ЫУ like the tea-soaked madeleine itself ‰ЫУ in a torrent of memory ‰Ы_ Cabourg ‰Ы_ We had just driven out of Cabourg ‰Ы_ out of Proust‰ЫЄs Balbec. [‰Ы_‰Ы_]
‰ЫПProustian musings still hung in the air when we came down to the edge of the water. It had been a notable adventure. True, an actual night passed in one of the bedrooms of the Grand Hotel itself ‰ЫУ especially, like Finn‰ЫЄs, an appropriately sleepless one ‰ЫУ might have crowned the magic of the happening. At the same time, a faint sense of disappointment superimposed on an otherwise absorbing inner experience was in its way suitably Proustian too: a reminder of the eternal failure of human life to respond a hundred per cent; to rise to the greatest heights without allowing at the same time some suggestion, however slight, to take shape in indication that things could have been even better.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПTwo compensations for growing old are worth putting on record as the condition asserts itself. The first is a vantage point gained for acquiring embellishments to narratives that have been unfolding for years beside one‰ЫЄs own, trimmings that can even appear to supply the conclusion of a given story, though finality is never certain, a dimension always possible to add. The other mild advantage endorses a keener perception for the authenticities of mythology, not only of the traditional sort, but ‰ЫУ when such are any good ‰ЫУ the latterday mythologies of poetry and the novel.‰Ыќ
Trapnel: ‰ЫПPeople think because a novel‰ЫЄs invented, it isn‰ЫЄt true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel‰ЫЄs invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can‰ЫЄt include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical. The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПFriendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward ‰ЫУ in contrast with love ‰ЫУ is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПWhere do any of us come from in this cold country? ‰Ы_ We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. ‰Ы_ We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of unlikely planting. ‰Ы_ We come from cemeteries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПBracey certainly had a high regard for my father. Verbal description of everything, however, must remain infinitely distant from the thing itself, overstatement and understatement sometimes hitting off the truth better than a flat assertion of bare fact. Bearing in mind, therefore, the all but hopeless task of attempting to express accurately the devious involutions of human character and emotions, you might equally have said with some authenticity that Billson was loved by Bracey, while Billson herself loved Albert. [‰Ы_] To make these clumsy statements about an immensely tenuous complex of relationships without hedging them in with every kind of limitation of meaning would be to give a very wrong impression of the kitchen at Stonehurst. At the same time, the situation must basically have resolved itself to something very like these uncompromising terms: a triangular connexion which, by its own awful, eternal infelicity, could almost be regarded by those most concerned as absolutely in the nature of things.‰Ыќ
Lieutenant Bithel takes a sleeping pill after drinking heavily his first night at the whatsit and won‰ЫЄt wake up in the morning with everyone else. Nick Jenkins describes the sleeping Bithel curled up and death-like in his bed:
His body in this position looked like a corpse exhumed intact from some primitive burial ground for display in the showcase of a museum. ‰Ы_ Before going to sleep, Bithel had placed his false teeth in the ashtray. He had removed the set from his mouth bodily, the jaws still clenched on the stub of the cigar. The effect created by this synthesis was extraordinary, macabre, surrealist. Again one thought of an excavated tomb, the fascination aroused in archaeologists of a thousand years hence at finding these fossilized vestiges beside Bithel‰ЫЄs hunched skeleton; the speculations aroused as to the cultural significance of such related objects.
‰ЫПThe pub, like pubs all over the world, was a place for debate and discussion, for the exchange of views and opinions, for argument and for the working out of problems. It was a forum, a parliament, a fountain of wisdom and a cesspool of nonsense, it was a center for the lost and the despairing, where cowards absorbed dutch courage out of small glasses and leaned against the shiny, scratched and polished mahogany counter for support against the crushing burdens of insignificant lives. Where the disillusioned gained temporary hope, where acts of kindness were considered and murders planned.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПBut, in a sense, nothing in life is planned ‰ЫУ or everything is ‰ЫУ because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the type of person one chances to be.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПOne could not help thinking how extraordinarily unlike ‰ЫПthe real thing‰Ыќ was this particular representation of a pair of lovers; indeed, how indifferently, at almost every level except the highest, the ecstasies and bitterness of love are at once conveyed in art. So much of the truth remains finally unnegotiable; in spite of the fact that most persons in love go through remarkably similar experiences. ‰Ы_ The matter was presented as all too easy, the twin flames of dual egotism reduced almost to nothing, so that there was no pain; and, for that matter, almost no pleasure.
‰Ы_‰Ы_
‰ЫПThe fact remained that an infinity of relevant material had been deliberately omitted from that vignette of love in action. These two supposedly good-looking persons were, in effect, going through the motions of love in such a manner as to convince others, perhaps less well equipped for the struggle than themselves, that they, too, the spectators, could be easily identified with some comparable tableau. They, too, could sit embracing on crimson chairs. Although hard to define with precision the exact point at which a breach of honesty had occurred, there could be no doubt that this performance included an element of the confidence-trick.
‰Ы_‰Ы_
‰ЫПPerhaps, in spite of everything, the couple on the postcard could not be dismissed so easily. It was in their world that I seemed now to find myself.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПA future marriage, or a past one, may be investigated and explained in terms of writing by one of its parties, but it is doubtful whether an existing marriage can ever be described directly in the first person and convey a sense of reality. Even those writers who suggest some of the substance of married life best, stylise heavily, losing the subtlety of the relationship at the price of a few accurately recorded, but isolated, aspects. To think at all objectively about one‰ЫЄs own marriage is impossible, while a balanced view of other people‰ЫЄs marriage is almost equally hard to achieve with so much information available, so little to be believed. Objectivity is not, of course, everything in writing; but if one has cast objectivity aside, the difficulties of presenting marriage are inordinate. Its forms are at once so varied, yet so constant, providing a kaleidoscope, the colours of which are always changing, always the same. The moods of a love affair, the contradictions of friendship, the jealously of business partners, the fellow feeling of opposed commanders in total war, these are all in their way to be charted. Marriage, partaking of such ‰ЫУ and a thousand more ‰ЫУ dual antagonisms and participations, finally defies definition.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПProbability is the bane of the age ‰Ы_ Every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows what is probable. The fact is most people have not the smallest idea what is going on round them. Their conclusions about life are based on utterly irrelevant ‰ЫУ and usually inaccurate ‰ЫУ premises.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПShe saw him arguing with himself, calculating the most noble thing to do. The thing that would require the most sacrifice. Weighing his guilt against his desire to go. He must be picturing her along in the house, with only Maya as her silent companion. And then himself in an army uniform. Which would be worse? He would choose that.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПThe aim is to warm up your glands with a series of jolts. The worst thing in the world for the body is to settle down and lead a quiet little life of regular habits; if you do that it soon resigns itself to old age and death. Shock your glands, force them to react, startle them back into youth, keep them on tip-toe so that they never know what to expect next, and they have to keep young and healthy to deal with all the surprises.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПA wife must always be on the look-out, men are so lazy by nature, for example, Montdore is for ever trying to have a little nap in the afternoon, but I won‰ЫЄt hear of it, once you begin that, I tell him, you are old, and people who are old find themselves losing interest, dropping out of things and then they might as well be dead.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПI didn‰ЫЄt know whether this was interesting ‰ЫУ that we were both thinking the same gruesome thing ‰ЫУ or even whether it was actually the case. Perhaps it was just rhetorical ESP: Kreskin‰ЫЄs Guide to Etiquette. But even if it was true, that we were about to say the same thing, did this connect us in some deep, private way? Or was it just a random obviousness shared between strangers? The deeper life between two people I had yet to read with confidence. It seemed a kind of vaporous text that kept revising its very alphabet.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПI was like every kid who had grown up in the country, allowing the weather ‰ЫУ good or bad ‰ЫУ to describe life for me: its mocking, its magic, its contradictions, its moody grip. Why not? One was helpless before everything.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПThe death of a concierge leaves a slight indentation on everyday life, belongs to a biological certainty that has nothing tragic about it and, for the apartment owners who encountered him every day in the stairs or at the door to our loge, Lucien was a non-entity who was merely returning to a nothingness from which he had never fully emerged, a creature who, because he had lived only half a life, with neither luxury or artifice, must at the moment of his death have felt no more than half a shudder of revolt.‰Ыќ
At this the dictionaries began to untwist,
and time stalled and reversed;
the sweaters wound back into their balls of wool,
which rolled bleating out into the meadows;
...
Squashed mice were shot backwards out of traps,
brides and grooms uncoupled like shunting trains,
tins of sardines exploded, releasing their wiggling shoals;
dinosaur bones whizzed like missiles
out of museums back to the badlands,
and bullets flew sizzling into their guns.
...
and everywhere
the children shrank and began to
drop teeth and grow hair.
---A sponge on the rampage is a formidable foe. It has no central nervous system, not like us.
‰ЫПIt‰ЫЄs not like us,‰Ыќ says Chris, from the top of his condo, where he has gone with his binoculars to reconnoitre. Amanda clings to him fearfully. What a shame this is ‰ЫУ they just bought the condo, in which they had great sex in Chapter One, and now look. All that decor gone to waste.
(from ‰ЫПThree Novels I Won‰ЫЄt Write Soon‰Ыќ)
‰ЫП‰ЫчPerhaps we are sound at heart. That is said of people who are unusually unpleasant.‰ЫЄ
‰ЫчWhy is it said of them?‰ЫЄ
‰ЫчWell, they are clearly sound nowhere else, and we cannot see the heart.‰ЫЄ‰Ыќ‰ЫЄ
‰ЫП‰ЫчThere is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other,‰ЫЄ said Francis.
‰ЫчIn the case of Mrs. Pettigrew and myself time has added to our mutual understanding. But I must not adduce my own experience as typical.‰ЫЄ
‰ЫчEverything adds to understanding,‰ЫЄ said Alice. ‰ЫчThat is why people seem better when you don‰ЫЄt really know them, and why new friendships are often best.‰ЫЄ
‰ЫчNow that is an attempt to be cynical,‰ЫЄ said Mr. Pettigrew.
‰ЫчAnd a successful one,‰ЫЄ said Francis.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПWhen the thing of beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders; I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look with rapture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. ‰Ы_ But people add other qualities to beauty ‰ЫУ sublimity, human interest, tenderness, love ‰ЫУ because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but for a little while. ‰Ы_ Too much has been written about beauty. That is why I have written a little more. Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПThe existential catastrophe for Schopenhauer was not so much eating as munching. Schopenhauer railed against the aimless nibbling of peanuts and potato chips while one engaged in other activities. Once munching has begun, Schopenhauer held, the human will cannot resist further munching, and the result is a universe with crumbs over everything.‰Ыќ ‰ЫУ from ‰ЫПThus Ate Zarathustra‰Ыќ
Re-read in late July and early Aug 2014 in preparation for the movie!! Better than the first time around (one-star improvement).
—
‰ЫПThe state liquor stamps over the tops of tequila bottles in the stores were coming unstuck, is how dry the air was. Liquor-store owners could be filling those bottles with anything anymore. Jets were taking off the wrong way from the airport, the engine sounds were not passing across the sky where they should have, so everybody‰ЫЄs dreams got disarranged, when people could get to sleep at all. In the little apartment complexes the wind entered narrowing to whistle through the stairwells and ramps and catwalks, and the leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together with a liquid sound, so that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvered light, it sounded like a rainstorm, the wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating together like the rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you to open the door and look outside, and of course there‰ЫЄd only be the same hot cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПThe accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglenooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody.‰Ыќ
Re-read on October 16, 2016. Tempted to upgrade it to 5 stars.
—
‰ЫПAnd so it came about that, like many other well-meaning people, they worried not so much about the dreadful things themselves as about their own inability to worry about them.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПShe had imagined that the presence of what she thought of as clever people would bring about some subtle change in the usual small talk. The sentences would be like bright jugglers‰ЫЄ balls, spinning through the air and being deftly caught and thrown up again. But she saw now that conversation could also be compared to a series of incongruous objects, scrubbing-brushes, dish-cloths, knives, being flung or hurtling rather than spinning, which were sometimes not caught at all but fell to the ground with resounding thuds.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПI was aware of an unexpected drift towards intimacy, although this sudden sense of knowing her all at once much better was not simultaneously accompanied by any clear portrayal in my own mind of the kind of person she might really be. Perhaps intimacy of any sort, love or friendship, impedes all exactness of definition. ... In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best. In any case, to attempt to describe a woman in the broad terms employable for a man is perhaps irrational.‰Ыќ
‰ЫПFor reasons not always explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.‰Ыќ
—
“Existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and ‰Ы_ almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; ... nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common; while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.”
My heartstrings tend to be quite resistant to tugging when it comes to books and movies and graphic novels (except maybe for those BBC literary adaptations), but agh, this did it. I do identify with the Christian upbringing, but I never did the high school romance or felt too isolated and guilt-ridden (I had the internet and an atheist uncle to support me in my doubts), so it's not like I'm doing that thing where you love something because you totally identify with it and it really seems like it was made just for you (I hate that kind of thing). But it was the scene where he and Raina are in her bed and she drops off to sleep, and then Craig sees the darkened portrait of Jesus lighten and beam at him. Gah!