Jordan > Recent Status Updates

“To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. …it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”

“…but then again, it was my duty to think about the welfare of the house in the long term, and if indeed these signs tended to support Mr Graham's notion that Miss Kenton was contemplating departing for romantic purposes, I clearly had a responsibility to probe the matter further.”

Sure. You’re probing for professional reasons. Whatever you say, Stevens.

“I recall turning the Ford round at about this stage and doubling back some distance in search of a turning I had passed earlier. But when I found it, this new road proved, if anything, more desolate than the one I had left.”

“But you must come now, Mr. Stevens, or else you may deeply regret it later.”

Finished ‘Day One,’ and Stevens has already recounted several anecdotes that reveal his attitude toward forgoing humanity in preservation of “dignity.” The most amusing is his comparison of Celtic butlers to men who will “at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and shirt and run about screaming.”

Whoa, that was some Suspiria energy

“So that feeling came again, even though I tried to keep it out: that we were doing all of this too late; that there’d once been a time for it, but we’d let that go by, and there was something ridiculous, reprehensible, about the way we were now thinking and planning.”

“It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that.“

“I had this idea at the time—and I was probably right—that if our sense…was allowed to seep away, then so too would whatever bound us together as Hailsham students. That’s why I tried for a while to keep going our enthusiasm…but…it soon began to feel like a lost cause.”

“I didn’t exclaim…I stood there quite still, looking at [it]… For a second, it even felt like a mistake. [It] had been the perfect excuse for all this fun, and now it had turned up, we'd have to stop. Maybe that was why, to my own surprise, I kept silent at first; why I thought about pretending never to have seen it. And now it was there in front of me, there was something vaguely embarrassing about [it]”

Ahhh. After Chapter 12 I think I know where this is going to go, thematically. I should’ve known, coming from Ishiguro.

That completes Part 1. From the beginning, I’ve noticed the narrator Kathy’s nervous rambling as she recounts her memories at Hailsham. And yet she speaks about, uh, pretty serious developments with a kind of nonchalance. Might this suggest an outer resignation to whatever lies ahead, but with inner trepidation?

“Tommy thought it possible the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we’d take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly.”

“I experienced virtual convulsions of fright. But that fright was so mixed with wonder and alluring grotesqueness, that it was almost a pleasant sensation.”

“The silence, all at once, penetrated; he felt his arms grow vague. In the absence of the Batys and Pris he found himself fading out, becoming strangely like the inert television he had just unplugged. You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all…You can’t go back, he thought. You can’t go from people to nonpeople.”

- “How about—not sex—but love?”

- “Love is another name for sex.”

- “Like love of country,” Rick said. “Love of music.”

- “If it’s love toward a woman or an android imitation, it’s sex. Wake up and face yourself, Deckard. You wanted to go to bed with a female type of android—nothing more, nothing less.”

😑

“He wished to god he had a real horse, in fact any animal. Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one.”

“…and my mind is so eternally secluded in itself, it is tempting, at last, to turn it out to another.”

- Linton!

- Yes, father?

- Have you nothing to show your cousin, anywhere about; not even a rabbit, or a weasel's nest? Take her into the garden, before you change your shoes; and into the stable to see your horse.

- Wouldn't you rather sit here? (asked Linton, addressing Cathy in a tone which expressed reluctance to move again.)
.........................

Big mood.

Welcome to your new home, Linton!
…
…
Nope, nevermind!

“Mrs Linton, on the third day, unbarred her door; and having finished the water in her pitcher and decanter, desired a renewed supply, and a basin of gruel, for she believed she was dying.”

If I ever become this dramatic, just go ahead and kill me.

‘And so do I. I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.’

This book hates dogs.

"It's better to accept the questions without demanding answers, to exist in the 'open-ended lived experience' of the moment, one where she can just be."

We gotta break this. These feelings shouldn’t feel weird.

“Language betrays us by making sexual attraction the synonym for fulfillment and excitement itself. When describing different types of social energy and intimacy…there are few metaphors that don’t resort to the sexual. Wanting to be ‘intimate’ with someone can seem lewd. Being in a ‘relationship’ with a friend sounds sort of odd.”

"The thrill of specialness." Now there's an intriguing phrase.

I could elaborate, but silly ol' Goodreads says my thoughts were 72 characters over the limit.

“Remember that I have the power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master — obey!”

“…his face was wrinkled into contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold…”

Every Trump speech.

“Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.”

Interesting how forms of loneliness and companionship are a not-insignificant theme so far.

“You will smile at my allusion [to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner]; but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of the ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets.”