Angie C > Recent Status Updates

(to retreat into) memory is a form of claustrophobia:

“In recompense for a mind that was able to retain everything, every memory, perhaps it was necessary that the body gradually fade away.” (119). Is captivity a fate worse than (memory’s) death?

(and now I’m concerned about the logistics of … typewriter usage for logographic languages… I wonder how many liberties were taken with this translation)

“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”: so much in 14 lines.
“A sun- a shadow of a magnitude.” (And-The unpaired rhymes of the first line adds a sort of heft.)
“O thou whose face…” “O fret not after Knowledge-I have none” - yes !!
“On Oxford” - Magd Deer Park Venison mentioned?!?!
“Lines of Seeing…” - hmm. A sense of , or wish for, immortality, yet words (and bodies) inevitability go up in smoke.

“We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies.” (173,Bernard)

absolutely wonderful section starting p170: “now to sum up…now to explain to you the meaning of my life.” (Bernard)

memory is a mud-stained poem. “This is poetry if we do not write it” (as we do not); “the poet who has written this page (what I read with people talking) has withdrawn. There are no commas or semi-colons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths. Much is sheer nonsense. (Neville, 142)

“I take a book and read half a page of anything.” Neville (140). Stagnation sets in - washed-out, paling, apathetic.

“I sing like the nightingale whose melody is crowded in the too narrow passage of her throat.”
(Jinny, p126)

“It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at.”
(Neville, p127)

excellent so far!

read: intro - on continuity + stepwise motion (gradatio)- gradus ad Parnassum altissimum , poetry as drama in miniature.

“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”(14)- “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” The untraversed worlds newly in view. (A newness which becomes planetary! universal! expansive beyond oneself. spinning a new reality in one mind’s view).

didn’t expect to have to think about “the death of the colonial imagination” re: Indian independence movement from British rule - but it’s a bit too obvious perhaps (civil disobedience - the 1930 Salt March - the waves taking on an anti-imperial symbolism at the time of (though at a later stage of) Woolf’s writing…) is this fear of a world in which England is losing its grip and preeminence?

“I cannot seat myself in some sordid eating-house and order the same glass day after day and imbue myself entirely in one fluid - this life.” (81)

i just want to pull apart every single sentence in this book, in the best possible way - just gorgeous, all of it

“But since I am neither a camera eye nor much given to writing pieces which do not interest me, whatever I do write reflects, sometime gratuitously, how I feel.” (Xiii)
“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” (4)

“But my body passes vagrant as a bird’s shadow. I should be transient as the shadow on the meadow…were it not that I coerce my brain to form in my forehead…I seem already to have lived many thousand years.” (46)
“The human voice has a disarming quality-(we are not single, we are one).” (47)
Words and words and words … (the desire for unity, and yet the innate tendency towards decomposition, exposed)

“I see wild birds, and impulses wilder than the wildest birds strike from my wild heart.” (40)
“The distance closes for ever in a point, and we for ever open the distance wide again.” (43)
“I open my body, I shut my body at my will. Life is just beginning. I now break into my hoard of life.” (44)
“But my body passes vagrant as a bird’s shadow.” (46)
a world’s emerging wideness yet construction..

p 36 has maybe some of the clearest and best quotes so far… an awakening groundedness, a desire to know oneself and one’s place fully and to be desired …

“There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing, all is quickness and triumph.” (31)
“I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life.” (33)
Coherence is a (learned) trap?

in a dangerous and wild and unpredictable world, there is a comfort in (certain) fantasy, even in its violent wildness, which didacticism and the dull constancy of reality (its “profanities”) constantly contradicts (and opposes and threatens…)

when “death” becomes real and not simply the imagined end of a hero’s narrative, the soliloquy played onto the shadow of an adoring audience, what then…?

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook - fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases. Under B shall come ‘Butterfly powder.’ If, in my novel, I describe the sun on the window-sill, I shall look under B and find butterfly powder. That will be useful.” (24)
“Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.” (26)

“Pouring down the walls of my mind, running together, the day falls copious, resplendent”
“Oh, to awake from dreaming!”
love the section on p 19 (“Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid.”) Solidity is replaced by erosion.

“I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers.”

A conspicuous closeness which when bridged only serves to emphasize a disunity which is now an ever-fixed mark…

“Hungry Joe was a throbbing, ragged mass of motile irritability. The steady ticking of a watch in a quiet room crashed like torture against his unshielded brain.”
“The nightmares appeared to Hungry Joe with celestial punctuality…”

War(time) is counted in missions, lacking objectivity or pattern or rationality… only a simple count, tick by tick… accumulating to nothing, leading nowhere.

“It’s harder to draw with new crayons.” What is lost in novelty, the break in lineage upon migration to the New World?

The idea of selective memory - indeed, the importance of what persists and is remembered, intentionally or not - is really front and center in this book in a way that I think becomes a bit more subtle in Ishiguro’s future works…

I’m still thinking about “I’ll remember that you promised…”

characters intransigent in their thinking and unreliable, retrospective narrators….

A par-a-dise: (pair of dice?)