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and when ... these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire.

The end of book 9: his dying mother cared nothing for burial in her homeland, only asked to be remembered at God's altar. And now Augustine writes, "Let them [all who read this book] remember [her] with dutiful fondness." Multiplied filial piety, all his readers become her mourners. But the dream of a multiple is a fear of/wish for castration, says Freud. We all fail in this request: "Remember me."

Book 9, the death of his friend Nebridius: such wan mourning ("Now he doesn't put his ear to my lips; instead, he puts his lips to the spirit of your spring") compared to the friend who died in book 4, before Augustine's conversion. Back then, "I hated everything, because nothing had him in it." Better to be mourned by Augustine the peri-convert.

...for who else calls us back from every one of death's delusions, if not the life that *doesn't know how to die*...

How odd to include "doesn't know" there. The life that doesn't die, sure, but doesn't *know how* to die? Or maybe the life that doesn't know death. But the incapacity of not knowing how seems odd. Zombie-like, too.

"The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads."

"It's the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time."

It has the sounds of "bank and shoal of time," from Macbeth. (I'm reading an edition without notes; no doubt others have seen this.)

"I dreaded death: I didn't want the one I had loved so much to die in his entirety when I died."

Apart from the implication that he got over this and people stopped dying, I really like this.

Also in book 6, on the topic of fate entangled with the fact of the poem's existence, at the end Hector, who enters book 6 pitying the women who don't know the men are dead, does a 180, imagines a compensatory fiction: "In future times/ we shall make this all turn out right..."

In book 6, fate becomes entangled with the fact of the poem's existence, that all those hearing it/reading it know what happened already. Other discrepancies of knowledge: Hector returns to the city, can't bear to tell the women that the men they pray for are already dead. Helen rails at the lot (fate) of Zeus making "us topics of a singer's tale/ for people in the future still unborn."

I picked this up on the strength of John Keene's praise for Mabanckou. Keene was on a panel about his own Counternarratives when he mentioned Mabanckou, said he was one of the most important writers today.

I'm giving up during the (literal) pissing contest between a customer at the bar and a character called Robinette ("Faucet" in French). Not "quel horreur," just can't vibe with the exaggerations. Not right now.

Chatty, breezy. Still, I can't not like it. It's good he was able to document such times, such mores, before he died.

Kind of speed-reading it, in advance of a class on it. I'm listening to it while I read along. I don't know Greek, and I've read Emily Wilson makes some odd choices at times, unpoetic ones, but for sense, I really like it.

I'm not sure I'll finish this, this time. It's remarkable, but I can only drift along with it just so far.

I never thought I’d witness something like this. I thought that other generations would live through these kinds of experiences; that they would happen first in other countries.

Amazing. The main character is uneducated and laconic, and yet part of what makes the book so compelling is his inner life.