Nola Brown > Recent Status Updates

Horseboy versus the grief of encroaching industrialization

“Cataract that this world is, it is remarkable to consider what does abide in it.”

“In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes… in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,-one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and streetcars.”

Holy moly. Besides this presently being one of the most quietly beautiful and magically personal things I’ve read rn, I also think it’s brilliant that Marilynne Robinson has chosen her dying protagonist to have a gentle, explorative theology and preaching career so she can have some doctrinal wiggle room and plausible deniability as the author !!! Or something

Here I am going to”oh my gosh these people are treating Mr Singer like a selfish little mirror, only talking to him to satisfy their inner frustration of being misunderstood, and they don’t see him as a real separate person because he does not hear or speak back to them” knowing damn well I would be next in line to yap to him if he boarded in my neighborhood

I think it’s so funny that societies loosen and revolutionize mainly bc people stop obeying their parents, personalize religion, and start spending money differently.

“…the longing of black men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life…And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.”

I’m getting emotional being able to read him talk about the dignity and beauty of education being sacrificed at the altar of industry and economy.

“How many heartfulls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat?”

“Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons — throw it to some human being or some human idea.”

I am going to be ill. Sick with. Emotions and feelings.

This is such a gd hard book wdym I read this when I was 14? “I would think of sin as I would think of the clothes we both wore in the world’s face, of the circumspection necessary because he was he and I was I.”

Do you know what that is supposed to mean? Do I? Faulkner also loves using 4 unrelated adjectives in a row with no Oxford comma. Is this fun yet?

Me when my southern gothic books have an old mean fat man to symbolize the selfishness and greed of the ruling class: 😏

Sick in bed read! Sick in bed read!

Beautiful. Air tight. Mic drop.

Did I mention to you how much this book rocks and rolls?

“The religious is really the conviction that with Gods help man is lighter than the whole world, the same faith that lies behind man’s ability to swim.”

Dang I gotta review some books I’m backlogged.

I am making this thing my

So does everyone remember the thrill and wonder and innocent wild love you had for the world and all its colors and innovation when we were learning about the Abbasid Caliohate and the Indian Ocean Trade Network in AP world? Cause that’s how I feel rn

Screw the French

Woah okay happy pride month ig good heavens

Ooh ahhh yessss yummy fiction finally satisfying my thirst mmmm aaaaaahhhhh I hate yucky boring nonfiction this is so fun

Cheapy McCheap over here decided not to put maps in his military history books so call me lewis and clark the way im cartographing my way thru this

HELP MEEEEEE HEEELLLPPP

Done with Part 1. Men need to sit in the corner and think about what they’ve done to women in western societies under the guise of aesthetic philosophy.

Ew ew ew finding philosophical/aesthetic arguments for why teen girls should be “uninteresting” and “isolated” REF DO SOMETHING