Carl > Recent Status Updates

A fascinating and tense story. The fact of slavery still raises such disbelief: how could purportedly decent civilized people have ever believed this “peculiar institution” was anything but a moral abomination?

>Potential spoiler< It’s especially surprising to learn that they knew where she was almost the whole time she was in New Hampshire. Fortunately, their first gesture at recapture was not a brutal one.

The literary world is full of vivid villains, from your Judge Holdens to your Tom Buchanans, but aside from perhaps Dickens no author’s villains are more entertaining than Austen’s.

Another McCarthy simile: “a surge of sorrow like a child beginning to cry” (203)

“That night they camped on a ledge of rock above the plains and watched the lightning all along the horizon provoke from the seamless dark the distant mountain ranges again and again” (93). Love the use of “provoke” here.

Interesting defiance of figurative language: simile for mountains = “like ghosts of mountains”; simile for a horse = “like the ghost of a horse”

Feelin ill at ease? Well, yeah: I’m reading Cormac McCarthy and trying to get my head around what’s goin on. But that aint nothin. It’ll come.

This offers tragic content akin to that of Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed but framed in a tone more reminiscent of Tony Horwitz’s Baghdad Without a Map. My wife called the title “clickbait,” and I agree: I have yet to be convinced that it is an apt thesis, even as I recognize its value from a marketing standpoint. In any case, the stories are well-told, richly detailed, and devastating.

The distinction between “sense” and “sensibility” (”sensible” being in “sense”’s camp…I think) requires careful attention for our modern minds!

The circumstances seem hardly comparable, but I keep thinking of Macbeth: “I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (3.4).