Status Updates From Contouren

Some quotes:

What Ryan had learnt from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.
Pg 41

…the feeling of some malady, which was really only the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea.

4 boating

I don’t care much for the’ Neighbor’, who seems to be mainly occupied with making an impression. Meanwhile I am puzzled about the Narrator’s motivations to meet up with him, let alone go out on a boat drive with the man. Cusk writes beautifully but it isn’t until we get to see a glimpse of the Narrator’s mind and state that I experience some engagement, some connection to the story.

After mentioning Wuthering Heights: …likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own.

…a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. (p73/74)