Velma > Recent Status Updates

“She hated philosophy but still quotes philosophers left and right in her essays. That’s how people are who believe in the absolute: they need a guru to show them the way.” —Minas, referring to Evelina

I am besotted with the surge in immigrant stories in fiction, experiencing my own country through new eyes. Much to learn.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
—Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Simultaneously too much and not enough. I’m beginning to skim.

How to read the air [“for signs of disturbance”]

Americans have no idea what refugees must endure to find a life here. (p40-43)

“...live in the world that is and try to shape the world that you want.” p273

Obi ocha = clean heart

“Racial Disorder Syndrome...mild, medium, and acute.”

“The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves.” p307

I think I would be afraid to have CNA sketch me in prose, because then I might have to know things about myself that would scare me.

“...both [were] unhappy people. But Kimberly’s unhappiness was inward, in acknowledged, shielded by her desire for things to be as they should, and also by hope: she believed in other people’s happiness because it meant that she, too, might one day have it. Laura’s unhappiness was different, spiky, she wished that everyone around her were unhappy because she had convinced herself that she would always be.”

Struck by the conversation (p138-39) about the “bleeping out” of the N-word in *Roots*, because I’ve always had the same reaction as Wambui, but as a vvhite woman I’ve questioned the value of my perspective.

“...America’s tribalism—race, ideology, and region—became clear.” p137

Obi’s comparison on p121 of Mr. Green and Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz, about how the latter “succumbed to the darkness” while the former “to the incipient dawn” brought to my mind the plot arc of (white) plantation overseer Robert Goodwin in The Long Song.

“He said life was like a bowl of wormwood which one sips a little at a time world without end. He understood the nature of tragedy.” p45

“What is left of the virgin redwood forest is like a few fragments of stained glass from a rose window in a cathedral after the rest of the window has been smashed and swept away.” p36

“Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.” p348

“It occurs to Adam where the word ‘radical’ came from. ‘Radix.’ ‘Wrad.’ ‘Root.’” p329

“This is what people do—solve their own problems in other peoples’ lives.” p247