Desirae > Recent Status Updates

Sides is just the best. Here he describes orcas in Prince William Sound: "Groups of orca whales resided here year-round, but there were transient orcas as well, which would fin in unannounced to prowl the rich waters and beat up the local orcas, like street-gang thugs, drunk on the sound's nutritional soups."

"Mademoiselle possessed too much of the spirit of intrigue to remain long without adventures." ☺️

This is a wonderful beginning, absorbing read so far.

What a master story-teller!

This is going to be brilliant.

This is wonderful!

Wonderful to be back with Proust for fall reading.

This is a good read; interesting to learn that had it not been for St Francis of Assisi, the reformation would have occurred several hundred years earlier.

Marvelous read

"When I'm rereading...I'm remembering my past self...I am marking the outlines of my current self. I'm that way, reading is not a separate act from the rest of my life. It is central to it."

I am absolutely captivated.

This is a wonderful, immersive reading experience. A biography, history, and art appreciation course; to be read slowly and thoughtfully.

This is very well written and compelling.

"...I have never encountered anyone who was not spurred along their path of growth and change by some setback or loss, some illness, anguish, or alienation. Fortunately- or unfortunately, depending on how we choose to see it- life has a way of delivering the requisite suffering right to our doorstep."

"If phenomena like addiction or mental distress are determined mostly by biological heredity, we are spared from having to look at how our social environment supports, or does not support, the parents of young children, and at how social attitudes, prejudices, and policies burden, stress, and exclude certain segments of the population, thereby increasing their propensity for suffering."

"It is a marker of our culture's insanity that certain individuals who flee from shame into a shameless narcissism may even achieve great social, economic, and political status and success." Indeed.

"Getting into the spiritual swing of things is no easy matter for the average person." Reading this book from 1925 is so interesting as all the current personal growth gurus (Mel Robbins, Eckhart Tolle, Instagram influencers, etc) preach the exact same message. Nothing changes. Of course this book is a product of its time and heavy with Biblical references. Fascinating read.

'If you think you are so enlightened, go spend a week with your parents' --Ram Dass
"The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise you will be forced to relive the past again and again."

'True salvation is fulfilment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself...[it] is a state of freedom...from past and future as a psychological need...there is only one point of access: the Now.'

The clarity of his writing is immensely appealing and comforting. And neuroscience confirms much of his message.

"Bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying."

Finally, characters I can care about-- excellent storytelling

Marvellous description of a thoroughbred horse amongst zebra: "...she never got close...without distending her nostrils in the manner of an 18th century grand dame forced to wade through the fringes of a Paris mob. As for the zebra, they replied in kind, moving out of her path with the ponderous dignity of righteous proletariat, fortified in their contempt by the weight of their number."

It's the Japanese version of Colombo- Intriguing start!

"It's such a poor story, isn't it? There is no hero, no heroine; there are only knaves and fools. Or do I mean only fools?"

"The baroque in human affairs is always interesting, don't you think?"

"He shifted himself, writhed worm-like, until he had his face under the smoke-hole and could see through to the sky, a single blue star. The music of the old woman's song went through him like the blood-memory of the sea...For a while he did not dare shut his eyes, to lose sight of the star."

"...love filled his heart to overflowing and in loving his fellow-men without cause he never failed to discover incontestable reasons that made them worth loving."

"He was filled with dread; but he felt too that the harder that fatal force strove to crush him the more did his own individual vitality assert itself in his soul."