Eleanor > Recent Status Updates

I loved the gut-punch romance that was The Chaser, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones has a really intriguing premise, but I am struggling to muster any enthusiasm at all for the titular story

God I wish I’d known this was based on Paul Gaugin before I started it.

“Today, it seems unbelievable that, thanks to a decade of austerity, the world’s fifth richest economy would be so woefully posed to respond and scale up fast to a public health emergency. The running down of public health in the decade before 2020 helped to turn what would have been a serious challenge into an ongoing tragedy.”

“I supposed that what I most value are real human relations and imagination. It is possible we cannot have one without the other.”

“Beauvoir is exploring her own feelings about Sartre’s wandering, toady eye, and she is also exploring her argument that love is more destabilizing for women than it is for men. In her view, this is because a man’s love for a woman is not what gives him his self-worth. I was no longer interested in exploring this kind of dynamic in my own writing. I could see no pleasure in it for the woman.”

“It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.”

Whenever I saw eccentric and sometimes mentally fragile older women feeding pigeons on the pavement of every city in the world, I thought, Yes, there she is, she is one of those cut-down goddesses who has become demented by life.

“I knew she would not want to see me (so there you are, nearly sixty and alone) and I did not want to see her either (so there you are, forty years old, hiding your talent, trying to keep your family together), but she and I haunted each other across time.”

There is a kind of introspection in her expression that I now relate to the very best of her. I can see that she is close to herself in this random moment./What do we need dreamy mothers for? We do not want mothers who gaze beyond us, longing to be elsewhere. We need her to be of this world, lively, capable, entirely present to our needs. Did I mock the dreamer in my mother & then insult her for having no dreams?

“It was obvious that femininity, as written by men and performed by women, was the exhausted phantom that still haunted the twenty-first century. […] What is a phantom anyway? The phantom of femininity is an illusion, a delusion, a societal hallucination. She is a very tricky character to play and it is a role that has made some women go mad.”

“The appeal of writing, as I understood it, was an invitation to climb in-between the apparent reality of things, to see not only the tree but the insects that live in its infrastructure, to discover that everything is connected in the ecology of language and living./ It doesn’t take more than three months of living to discover that we are all connected to each other’s cruelty and to each other’s kindness.”

“It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense she had unsettled a boundary …”

“Couples laughed as they burned together like kindling on a funeral pyre, their arms interlaced, flames licking their bodies and stretching up into the heavens.”

Such a lovely philosophy on life and love here, aahhh

Yeah, I can’t go on any further with this.

Not going to lie, I’ve chosen this because I’ve had migraines all week and this is the biggest font I can find.

Physically dreading carrying on now because I don't want it all to fall apart

“A child of the stage, who matured in the stalls [...] Casanova understood better than anyone alive that the purpose of performance was to turn perishable reality into immortal myth. Actors, like all artists, seek to cheat death [...] driven by that same impulse to survive beyond his allocated years, he used the devices of art to sculpt his own existence. Casanova’s was a life lived as a work of art.”

How can I be bawling my eyes out at the arrest of a man I have always known was executed over 450 years ago?