Laura

‰ЫПAfter this long together, both of our heads are filled with such minor admonitions, helpful hints about the other person ‰ЫУ likes and dislikes, preferences and taboos. Don‰ЫЄt come up behind me like that when I‰ЫЄm reading. Don‰ЫЄt use my kitchen knives. Don‰ЫЄt just stew things. Each believes the other should respect this frequently reiterated set of how-to instructions, but they cancel each other out: if Tig must respect my need to wallow mindlessly, free of bad news, before the first cup of coffee, shouldn‰ЫЄt I respect his need to spew out catastrophe so he himself will be rid of it?‰Ыќ

‰ЫПAfter a simple dinner I go out on the porch and gaze up at the stars twinkling above, the random scattering of millions of stars. Even in a planetarium you wouldn‰ЫЄt find this many. Some of them look really big and distinct, like if you reached your hand out intently you could touch them. The whole thing is breathtaking.

‰ЫПNot just beautiful, though ‰ЫУ the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they‰ЫЄre watching me. What I‰ЫЄve done up till now, what I‰ЫЄm going to do ‰ЫУ they know it all. Nothing gets past their watchful eyes. As I sit there under the shining night sky, again a violent fear takes hold of me. My heart‰ЫЄs pounding a mile a minute, and I can barely breathe. All these millions of stars looking down on me, and I‰ЫЄve never given them more than a passing thought before. Not just stars ‰ЫУ how many other things haven‰ЫЄt I noticed in the world, things I know nothing about? I suddenly feel helpless, completely powerless. And I know I‰ЫЄll never outrun that awful feeling.‰Ыќ

For a gender (i.e. queer) theory class. I'm supposed to read this in ONE WEEK.

—

‰ЫПWestern man has become a confessing animal. Whence a metamorphosis in literature: we have passed from a pleasure to be recounted and heard, centering on the heroic or marvelous narration of ‰Ычtrials‰ЫЄ of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПThomas Mann‰ЫЄs definition of a writer. Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПI knew I was not as important as Claire, so returning after the funeral I just stood around, wanting to let him know I was there ‰ЫУ standing there with everyone else rushing about. I am not good at those sorts of arrangements, pouring drinks or holding out a hand to a woman to help her from her chair; even sitting in the corner of the parlour with the men, smoking and talking in appropriate ways. I had nothing to say in the appropriate ways. I could not help out because I no longer knew the house, not as some of the others did, or what was needed, or what they might have wanted from me. Several times, though perhaps as few as one or two, he did give me a direct, tired look, but I didn‰ЫЄt know what it meant, whether it was mostly incriminating or not. I cannot go to his house. I can tell he doesn‰ЫЄt see inside me or even care to anymore.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПExhausted and near tears, I went to the mirror. I often go to the mirror when crying, to see how I might look. I wonder whether I‰ЫЄd have any sympathy for a man such as myself. Sometimes I feel I would, and it makes me cry even harder; other times I do not and it fills me with despair ‰ЫУ well, then I weep more pitifully than before. In these ways I find I am able to enjoy myself. The pure times I spend alone are rare.‰Ыќ

I should have read this years ago – I would be enjoying it much more. Fun and enjoyable, but disappointing, because I was planning to love it.

—

‰ЫПThe best of women (I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites. We don‰ЫЄt know how much they hide from us; how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidential; how often those frank smiles, which they wear so easily, are traps to cajole or elude or disarm ‰ЫУ I don‰ЫЄt mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models, and paragons of female virtue. Who has not seen a woman hide the dullness of a stupid husband, or coax the fury of a savage one? We accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it; we call this pretty treachery truth.‰Ыќ

—

“There was a picture of the family over the mantelpiece, removed thither from the front room after Mrs. Osborne‰ЫЄs death ‰ЫУ George was on a pony, the elder sister holding him up a bunch of flowers; the younger led by her mother‰ЫЄs hand; all with red cheeks and large red mouths, simpering on each other in the approved family-portrait manner. The mother lay underground now, long since forgotten ‰ЫУ the sisters and brother had a hundred different interests of their own, and, familiar still, were utterly estranged from each other. Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied.”

‰ЫПShe had a way of quizzing him from time to time: he could actually see her weighing his pros and cons and reaching some conclusion which she never imparted. As a young husband, ardent and unsure, he used to beg her to tell him what she was thinking: nowadays he was truly thankful that she wouldn‰ЫЄt. He believed they had achieved the right degree of ignorance to sustain a happy marriage.‰Ыќ

A surprise; I did not expect it to be so awesome.

‰ЫПPrairie tried bringing her hair forward in long bangs, brushing the rest down in front of her shoulders, the surest way she knew, her eyes now burning so blue through the fringes and shadows, to creep herself out, no matter what time of day or night, by imagining that what she saw was her mother‰ЫЄs ghost. And that if she looked half a second too long, it would begin to blink while her own eyes stayed open, its lips would start to move, and then speak to her stuff she was sure she‰ЫЄd rather not hear ‰Ы_. / Or maybe that you‰ЫЄve ached all your life to hear but you‰ЫЄre still scared of? the other face seemed to ask, lifting one eyebrow a fraction more than Prairie could feel in her own face.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПFrenesi had thought for a while that her need to talk would build out of control, till she was helpless to hold it in and she ended up as a crazy woman on a bus bench, along an endless flatland boulevard, talking out loud without rest, like an astronomer seeking life out in space, on a brave slender hope that somebody might begin to listen. But in practice she‰ЫЄd only kept getting up one morning after another till at some point she found she‰ЫЄd adapted well enough to what she was becoming.‰Ыќ

Really too similar to A. L. Barker and Barbara Pym to be reading right on their heels, though with oodles more emotion (in the manipulative sense; cancer and small sweet children and such), so it‰ЫЄs time to break away from the women with their epiphanies and weeping and read some dudes from a different era.

‰ЫПI drink milk very rarely now; in fact, the half-pint carton I bought at Papa Gino‰ЫЄs to go with the cookie was one of the very last times: it was a sort of test to see whether I still could drink it with the old pleasure. (You have to spot-check your likes and dislikes every so often in this way to see whether your reactions have altered, I think.)‰Ыќ

‰ЫПUsed with care, substances that harm neural tissues, such as alcohol, can aid intelligence: you corrode the chromium, giggly, crossword puzzle‰ЫТsolving parts of your mind with pain and poison, forcing the neurons to take responsibility for themselves and those around them, toughening themselves against the accelerated wear of these artificial solvents. After a night of poison, your brain wakes up in the morning saying, ‰ЫчNo, I don‰ЫЄt give a shit who introduced the sweet potato into North America.‰ЫЄ The damage that you have inflicted heals over, and the scarred places left behind have unusual surface areas, roughnesses enough to become the nodes around which wisdom weaves its fibrils.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПIn the morning, when she did finally get up, Ann went around the house turning off each lamp. Somehow, the lamps burning in the daylight made her feel sad. For they burned, but they shed no light.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПTo Lord Peter Wimsey, the few weeks of his life spent in unravelling the Problem of the Iron Staircase possessed an odd dreamlike quality, noticeable at the time and still more insistent in retrospect. The very work that engaged him ‰ЫУ or rather, the shadowy simulacrum of himself that signed itself on every morning in the name of Death Bredon ‰ЫУ wafted him into a sphere of dim platonic archtypes, bearing a scarcely recognizable relationship to anything in the living world. Here those strange entities, the Thrifty Housewife, the Man of Discrimination, the Keen Buyer and the Good Judge, for ever young, for ever handsome, for ever virtuous, economical and inquisitive, moved to and fro upon their complicated orbits, comparing prices and values, making tests of purity, asking indiscreet questions about each other‰ЫЄs ailments, household expenses, bed-springs, shaving cream, diet, laundry work and boots, perpetually spending to save and saving to spend, cutting out coupons and collecting cartons, surprising husbands with margarine and wives with patent washers and vacuum-cleaners, occupied from morning to night in washing, cooking, dusting, filling, saving their children from germs, their complexions from wind and weather, their teeth from decay and their stomachs from indigestion, and yet adding so many hours to the day by labour-saving appliances that they had always leisure for visiting the talkies, sprawling on the beach to picnic upon Potted Meats and Tinned Fruit, and (when adorned by So-and-so‰ЫЄs Silks, Blank‰ЫЄs Gloves, Dash‰ЫЄs Footwear, Whatnot‰ЫЄs Weatherproof Complexion Cream and Thingummy‰ЫЄs Beautifying Shampoos), even attending Ranelagh, Cowes, the Grand Stand at Ascot, Monte Carlo and the Queen‰ЫЄs Drawing-Rooms.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПAt the age of eleven she wrote her first story ‰ЫУ a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folktales and lacking, she realized later, that vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a reader‰ЫЄs respect. But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing the know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character‰ЫЄs weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world, could she feel immune ‰Ы_.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПMost of the time, however, she wallowed in the guilt, shoving it back when she was awake, and awakening it when she was asleep, dreaming. She found that she was growing sleepy earlier and earlier. If she was asleep she couldn‰ЫЄt be expected to be doing that which she was avoiding, and she knew sleep was a good way of avoiding it. But she also made herself sleep so that she could let the guilt come forward. It was always pressuring to come out, and it found easy access in her dreams.‰Ыќ

‰ЫП‰Ы_ I can now, methinks (for the first time) a little account for those dark spirits who may be too much obliged; and who, despairing to be able ever to return the obligation, are ready to quarrel with the obliger.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПAre we not taught, that this world is a state of trial, and of mortification? And is not calamity necessary to wean our vain hearts from it?‰Ыќ

‰ЫПThe happiness of human Life ‰Ы_ is at best but comparative. The utmost we should hope for here, is such a situation, as, with a self-approving mind, will carry us best through this present scene of trial: Such a situation, as, all circumstances considered, is, upon the whole, most eligible for us, tho‰ЫЄ some of its circumstances may be disagreeable. Young people set out with false notions of happiness; gay, fairyland imaginations; and when these schemes prove unattainable, sit down in disappointment and dejection.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПYou look upon Love as a blind irresistable Deity, whose darts fly at random, and admit neither defence nor cure. Consider the matter, my dear, in a more reasonable light. The passions are intended for our servants, not our masters, and we have, within us, a power of controuling them, which it is the duty and the business of our lives to exert. You will allow this readily in the case of any passion that poets and romance-writers have not set off with their false colourings. To instance in anger; Will my Henrietta own, that she thinks it probable, anger should ever transport her beyond the bounds of duty?‰Ыќ

‰ЫП‰Ы_ Schmidt had a quick vision of them all in the conference room as like icebergs and/or floes, only the sharp caps showing, unknown and -knowable to one another, and he imagined that it was probably only in marriage (and a good marriage, not the decorous dance of loneliness he‰ЫЄd watched his mother and father do for seventeen years but rather true conjugal intimacy) that partners allowed each other to see below the berg‰ЫЄs cap‰ЫЄs public mask and consented to be truly known, maybe even to the extent of not only letting the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their left arm or the way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both both feet turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other‰ЫЄs arms late at night and pouring out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness ‰Ы_‰Ыќ

‰ЫПIt needed this voice from the past to recall me; the indiscriminate chatter of praise all that crowded day had worked on me like a succession of advertisement hoardings on a long road, kilometre after kilometre between the poplars, commanding one to stay at some new hotel, so that when at the end of the drive, stiff and dusty, one arrives at the destination, it seems inevitable to turn into the yard under the name that had first bored, then angered one, and finally become an inseparable part of one‰ЫЄs fatigue.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПHe simply wasn‰ЫЄt all there. He wasn‰ЫЄt a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПWe, all of us, read more in the faces of those with whom we hold converse, than we are aware of doing. Of the truth, or want of truth in every word spoken to us, we judge, in great part, by the face of the speaker. By the face of every man and woman seen by us, whether they speak or are silent, we form a judgment, ‰ЫУ and in nine cases out of ten our judgment is true. It is because our tenth judgment, ‰ЫУ that judgment which has been wrong, ‰ЫУ comes back upon us always with the effects of its error, that we teach ourselves to say that appearances cannot be trusted. If we did not trust them we should be walking ever in doubt, in darkness, and in ignorance.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПO yes, he will make the prettiest husband in the world; you may fly about yourself as wild as a lark, and keep him the whole time as tame as a jack-daw: and though he may complain of you to your friends, he will never have the courage to find fault to your face. But as to Mortimer, you will not be able to govern him as long as you live; for the moment you have put him upon the fret, you‰ЫЄll fall into the dumps yourself, hold out your hand to him, and, losing the opportunity of gaining some material point, make up at the first soft word. ‰Ы_ [F]or while you are quarrelling, you may say any thing, and demand any thing, but when you are reconciled, you ought to behave pretty, and seem contented. ‰Ы_ [N]ot a creature thinks of our principles, till they find them out by our conduct: and nobody can possibly do that till we are married, for they give us no power beforehand. The men know nothing of us in the world while we are single, but how we can dance a minuet, or play a lesson upon the harpsichord.‰Ыќ

On the first page of her first book about him, Sayers describes Lord Peter Wimsey: ‰ЫПHis long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.‰Ыќ

“A marvellous discovery indeed ‰ЫУ that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! Happily Rezia put her hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down, transfixed, or the excitement of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave, like plumes on horses‰ЫЄ heads, feathers on ladies‰ЫЄ, so proudly they rose and fell, so superbly, would have sent him mad. But he would not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more.”

‰ЫПI am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids). Even I am baffled. But not for long! (he cried, with a magnificent burst of self-confidence). My Honour (capital H) is concerned to track this Human Fiend (capitals) to its hidden source, and nail the whited sepulchre to the mast even though it crush me in the attempt! Loud applause. His chin sank broodingly upon his dressing-gown, and he breathed a few guttural notes into the bass saxophone which was the cherished companion of his solitary hours in the bathroom.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПI hated my job, but I liked that I could do it. I had once believed in a precious inner self, but now I didn‰ЫЄt. I had thought that I was fragile, but I wasn‰ЫЄt.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПWe grew still and stared at each other. It seemed incredibly dangerous to look into each other‰ЫЄs eyes, but we were doing it. For how long can you behold another person? Before you have to think of yourself again, like dipping the brush back in for more ink. For a very long time; you didn‰ЫЄt need to get more ink, there was no reason to get anything else, because she was as good as me, she lived on earth like me, she suffered as I did. It was she who looked away and pulled the sheet to her chin.‰Ыќ

Re-read in late July 2013 because the littlest thing can provoke a Sayers binge.

—

The girl, in an exaggerated gown of petunia satin with an enormous bustle and a train, exhibited a mask of Victorian coyness as she revolved languidly in her partner‰ЫЄs arms to the strains of the ‰ЫПBlue Danube.‰Ыќ ‰ЫПAutres temps, autres moeurs,‰Ыќ thought Harriet. She looked about the room. Long skirts and costumes of the ‰ЫЄseventies were in evidence ‰ЫУ and even ostrich feathers and fans. Even the coyness had its imitators. But it was so obviously an imitation. The slender-seeming waists were made so, not by savage tightlacing, but by sheer expensive dressmaking. To-morrow, on the tennis-court, the short, loose tunic-frock would reveal them as the waists of muscular young women of the day, despising all bonds. And the sidelong glances, the down-cast eyes, the mock-modesty ‰ЫУ masks, only. If this was the ‰ЫПreturn to womanliness‰Ыќ hailed by the fashion-correspondents, it was to a quite different kind of womanliness ‰ЫУ set on a basis of economic independence. Were men really stupid enough to believe that the good old days of submissive womanhood could be brought back by milliners‰ЫЄ fashions? ‰ЫПHardly,‰Ыќ thought Harriet, ‰ЫПwhen they know perfectly well that one has only remove the train and the bustle, get into a short skirt and walk off, with a job to do and money in one‰ЫЄs pocket. Oh, well, it‰ЫЄs a game, and presumably they all know the rules.‰Ыќ

‰ЫчWhat I like about your evidence, Miss Kohn, is that it adds the final touch of utter and impenetrable obscurity to the problem which the Inspector and I have undertaken to solve. It reduces it to the complete quintessence of imcomprehensible nonsense. Therefore, by the second law of thermo-dynamics, which lays down that we are hourly and momently progressing to a state of more and more randomness, we receive positive assurance that we are moving happily and securely in the right direction. You may not believe me,‰ЫЄ added Wimsey, now merrily launched on a flight of fantasy, ‰Ычbut I have got to the point now at which the slightest glimmer of common-sense imported into this preposterous case would not merely disconcert me but cut me to the heart. I have seen unpleasant cases, difficult cases, complicated cases and even contradictory cases, but a case founded on stark unreason I have never met before. It is a new experience and, blasМ© as I am, I confess that I am thrilled to the marrow.‰ЫЄ

‰ЫПThe wares, too, which the vendors display on their stalls are valuable not in themselves but as signs of other things ‰Ы_. Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПMarco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man‰ЫЄs place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real of hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else‰ЫЄs present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПI thought: ‰ЫчYou reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.‰ЫЄ‰Ыќ