ashley > Recent Status Updates

“In order to be immortal, you have to die several times within a lifetime..”

I’m pretty interested in the story at this point and the execution is okay but I feel like I’m not particularly seduced by the characters, concepts or descriptions…so maybe that’s what I look for. To be seduced by at least some part of the story…very often reads as an essay and therefore doesn’t linger in my head when I put it down

I keep thinking about a quote from the first chapter that will stay with me for a long time:

“. . . Willard found himself at the gravesite suddenly and inextricably stricken with that sense of things that can descend upon the tender-hearted, even at the death of an enemy—that surely the spirit had been deeper, and the life more tragic, than he had ever imagined.”

I do believe his travels to North Africa and his curiosity to learn from other cultures were done mostly in earnest..and I admire this man—but it was disappointing to read a few specific lines of him pigeonholing what he saw as “primitive living” and his reflection on Europe as “sophisticated, rigid and modern”. Typical white European take. Like who’s gonna tell him there were African philosophers ?

So far perfectly captures the feeling I get visiting family in the Midwest every summer..the flat fields with one house every few miles and the old churches.. that’s how the prose feels.

“Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.”