Angie C > Recent Status Updates

this book is so frustratingly British … 😐

surprisingly compulsively readable and Ali Smith - esque …

!!!

The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet.

The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet.

“On Hope”: a fitting companion to the end of Camus’ MoS - “o let me think it is not quite in vain / To sigh out sonnets to the midnight air!”
some strange echoes of nationalism / colonial steadfastness in stanza 6. (Perhaps an example of the deluded, eventually Absurd “conquerer” type described by Camus…)
Liberty herself is mortal and yet is hoped-for as angelic. (Absurd freedom is deified.)

Death, too, has patrician hands which, while crushing, also liberate.

Walt Whitman is a real one

restarting and taking notes because I’ve literally forgotten everything I’ve read here from a month ago. so much better like this. now thinking of this in terms of The Absurd and that is quite nice -

“To will is to stir up paradoxes” - I sincerely want to print out this entire paragraph from p 16-17 and tape it on my lab desk. All science (in all its apparent objectivity) is fundamentally uncertain and filtered through human consciousness.

(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poetry if we do not write it” (as we do not); “the poet who has written this page (what I read with people talking) has withdrawn.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.