Noah Damski > Recent Status Updates

I’m stupid, but when a book gets too long, I just get tired. I finished the earlier James Baldwin books because they were all about this length, but I’m only halfway done with this one. I’m taking a break and going back to Joan Didion.

“the secrets of everyone were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished.”

I am grateful to never experience this sort of hell. A world beaten black-and-blue.

The James Baldwin train carries on, book #4 now. He has returned to being “semi-autobiographical,” but to reflect a very different era of his life as was in “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

“The train rocked, he held me closer, and a kind of sigh I’d never heard before stifled itself in him.

It’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body—the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.”

“And everything was different. I was walking through streets I had never seen before. The faces around me, I had never seen. We moved in a silence which was music from everywhere.”

“Fonny loved me too much, we needed each other too much. We were a part of each other, flesh of each other’s flesh—which meant that we so took each other for granted that we never thought the flesh.”

“By now, Mama had poured herself some gin and orange juice and was sitting at the table, opposite him. She was swinging her foot; she was thinking ahead.”

“All I really remember is the pain, the unspeakable pain; it was as though I were yelling up to Heaven and Heaven would not hear me. And if Heaven would not hear me, if love could not descend from Heaven—to wash me, to make me clean—then utter disaster was my portion.”

It’s nice reading this at the same time as the James Baldwin book, because they explore the same topic, but this though philosophy and the other through narration.

Courage is self-affirmation in-spite-of anxiety. Existence is being gained in-spite-of nonbeing.

Happy New Year, my dear Kindle family.

I’m not going to be able to finish this book before the New Year, bc I’ve the festivities to attend to, but man oh man, I miss reading such page-turning fiction.

“For a moment her pride stood up; the resolution that had brought her to this place tonight faltered, and she felt that if Gabriel was the Lord’s anointed, she would rather die and endure Jell for all eternity than bow before His alter.”

“His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.”

Life is the process in which the power of being actualizes itself. Anxiety is the existential awareness of one’s finitude as finitude, or the experience of man as man, so courage is self-affirmation in spite of that.

I’ve read nearly 30 books this year, I’m very proud of how much I’ve accomplished. Onto next year, where I hope I’ll dedicate myself evermore to reading.

I was not expecting this book to be good, but it has me tearing up. Thank you Tim, for sharing your life on these pages.

Im bored, and so I read, as respite from the boredom.

I’m hesitant to get into his fantasy, so I’m reading this first. Fresh, intrapersonal memoir: it’ll be a quick read.

“-which perhaps means nothing or possibly means very much.” The conjectures of this book are interesting, but damn does Freud like to make absolute conclusions based on possibilities.

“He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady everytime I ever went on the air again.”

“You either take to somebody or you don’t. If you do, then you do all the talking and nobody can even get a word in edgewise. If you don’t like somebody—which is most of the time—then you just sit around like death itself and let the person talk themself into a hole.”

“The pet is either sterilized or sexually isolated, extremely limited in its exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods…They are creatures of their owner’s way of life.”

Great intro, jumps right into the sentiment of absolute chaos. Divides East and West Beirut to explain the groups vying for power on both sides.

Reading the chapter on American involvement in ‘82 and the unreliability reminds me entirely of the Paris Peace Accords re Vietnam in ‘73.

He uncovered an Alan Watts-esque ideology through art, I love him so much.

“We think of this zero—the geometric point—in relation to the greatest possible brevity, which, nevertheless, speaks.

Thus we look upon the geometric point as the ultimate and most singular union of silence and speech.”

Interesting point he tries to make, that the era of Impressionism before him was devoid of any theoretical science of art; I don’t know enough to determine if he was right or is being arrogant.

“Contrary to the static form-ideal of painting which prevailed in the past millennium, where the subjective object was immediately perceived as a whole and graphically recorded by the intellect, always directed objectively earth-ward, the moving form-ideal of today sets into motion the eye in any desired direction of the rhythmic non-objective creation.”

“The Aztecs called the place Teotihuacan, burial place of kings; the ancients said: he who has died became a god.”

The crux of this book so far is that the current state of our brains is not how it has always been; there was a time in which the right and left hemispheres of the brain could not recognize each other and so one’s thoughts were not recognized as coming from within.

I wanna branch out from American novelists and read educational topics but when I read this stuff I go through pages without understanding what I’ve just read.

One thing I picked up from reading history is to read from secondary authors rather than primary authors—journalists and professors rather than historians. So I’m trying this with psychology now, every chapter here is an opinion on Jaynes’ thoughts.

I have all these unfinished books on my profile and idk if I’ll go back to them where I was, restart them, or simply discard them bc I had stopped reading them at one point to begin with.