the big slime > Recent Status Updates

Tallgrass prairies, oak openings, white pine forests, herds of bison, and the people who might choose to live amid these things: none would ever be the same again. As village became metropolis, so frontier became hinterland…Viewed from the banks of the Chicago River, the Great West is both an urban empire and a countryside transformed.

“Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court… Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.” (Pg. 261)

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do any-thing. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine.
And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.
You believe that?
I dont know.
Believe that.”

Finished book 10… this is a slog, but I do feel as though something was taken from me. Also kinda just feels like Milton writing about his gripes with women and marriage at times. Tragic, beautiful, boring, and also, to me, a tad humorous at times.

“It’s a useful habit never to believe more than half of what people tell you, and not to concern yourself with the rest. Rather keep your mind free and your path your own.”

“True, the world has great superficial beauty when it is at its best, in the murmuring groves of California, for instance, or in the sun-gilded palm-avenues of the Mediterranean, but the heart's inner glow grows so much the more ashen the more brilliantly the diamonds of creation shine upon it.”

Don’t ruin Nonni now cmon…

Bjartur or Daniel Plainview? I hate him so much. He just gets worse and worse. Good heavens. RIP to that cow frfr

Bjartur is such a piece of shit. My poor Asta. Somebody protect this girl please.

The way Laxness in ‘Of The World’ describes the intoxicating excitement that comes with youth, and the simultaneous loss of innocence, that which inevitably arrives with it, is incredible. Great stuff. Best portion of the book so far.

Lines 710-718 in Book 6 go so hard holy