Noah Philipose > Recent Status Updates

(Reread one year into the current admin)

“Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience."

“Once... long ago, he'd thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.”

How much has Paul truly changed? Is he any different from past rulers?

“‘I've loitered’, he thought. And he saw how he'd been hemmed in by boundaries of love and the Jihad. And what was one life, no matter how beloved, against all the lives the Jihad was certain to take? Could single misery be weighed against the agony of multitudes?”

Immediately, Messiah has a darker tone. I predict that the film series is racing towards tragedy, and so far, Messiah is confirming that. FUCK

A bitter laugh escaped Jessica. “Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine— never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine-history will call us wives."

The first film glosses over the middle parts of this book with Jessica and Paul in the desert much faster, but I was truly agonizing reading the same passages. I’ve finally broken thru those parts, and it’s back to being a good read. ~ 80ish pages left to go, and Paul is slipping into destiny, whether he wants to or not.

“To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.”

She had quoted a Bene Gesserit proverb to him: "When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong-faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late."

im fighting for my life

“Jessica turned away, frightened of the bitter strength in her son's voice, hearing the precise assessment of chances. She sensed that his mind had leaped ahead of her, that it now saw more in some respects than she did. She had helped train the intelligence which did this, but now she found herself fearful of it. Her thoughts turned, seeking toward the lost sanctuary of her Duke, and tears burned her eyes.”

“What’s in the box?”

“Pain.”

ngl going from Dostoevsky to a quaint, warm family drama hasn’t been great. I feel no sense of urgency or excitement here, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t make you feel good at points. I’m struggling to get through mostly because it all feels very “small potatoes” if that makes sense? It’s written well, but sometimes a bore. I really miss the serious, introspective language of Brontë

“Quite by accident, of course, some pretty, easy music lay on the piano, and with trembling fingers and frequent stops to listen and look about, Beth at last touched the great instrument, and straightway forgot her fear, herself, and everything else but the unspeakable delight which the music gave her, for it was like the voice of a beloved friend.”

“There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.”

“The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book.”

“Razumihin remembered that minute all his life. Raskolnikov's burning and intent eyes grew more penetrating every moment, piercing into his soul, into his consciousness. Suddenly Razumihin started. Something strange, as it were, passed between them…Some idea, some hint, as it were, slipped, something awful, hideous, and suddenly understood on both sides... Razumihin turned pale.”

He felt it almost amusing, and yet it wrung his heart. Deep down, hidden far away out of sight all that seemed to him now—all his old past, his old thoughts, his old problems and theories, his old impressions and that picture and himself and all, all... He felt as though he were flying upwards, and everything were vanishing from his sight.

Rodion’s nightmare about the horse is genuinely one of the most disturbing and crushing things I’ve ever read. A mob of drunken men whip it and beat it to death while people stand and watch, as Rodion wails in anguish. Lots of interpretations can be made of this dream, none of them comforting. Is it a symbol of his own innocence being cruelly destroyed by external factors? Is it his sister? Harrowing chapter.

“… poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary-never—no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible…”

‘He guessed as well as he could, and crawled along for a good way, till suddenly his hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel. It was a turning point in his career, but he did not know it. He put the ring in his pocket almost without thinking; certainly it did not seem of any particular use at the moment.’

Oh Bilbo, little do you know…