Noah > Recent Status Updates

Ok I take it back - while one chapter lost me a bit, there have been multiple since that I’ve found engaging and meaningful. Particularly “The Allegory of the Cave” and “Drinking Hot Coffee through a Straw.”

Started strong but is currently collapsing in on its own overly-inflated sense of self-awareness. wants to weave in and out of taking itself seriously often enough that it’s sort of losing me a bit. The section on “greatness” is simply too abstract and low stakes for me to care all that much.

Already a breath of fresh air. It’s rare for authors nowadays to write criticism in the classical sense of that term - not to be critical as in the convenient and often self-puffing cynical slam-piece - but to be critical as in to think independently, through the good and the bad elements of a thing, and to come to a new understanding of something not through absorption of more data, but through real reflection.

Why is Nelly the only real adult in this entire place

"Something strange and wonderful happened to him: gradually, as he became more and more fervent in prayer, he had less and less to say, and finally he became entirely silent. He became silent. Indeed, he became what is, if possible, even more the opposite of talking than silence: he became a listener. He had thought that to pray is to talk; he learned that to pray is not only to keep silent, but to listen."

History told like a thriller. Style meshes with the case he makes about how IRA guerrillas thought of themselves. While he briefly notes some general conditions of oppression Catholics were living with in NI, expected more analysis of the context that led to the Troubles. So far a mostly mythic account of the guerrilla movement itself, but also the recipe of oppression + certain resistance tactics = nightmare.

“It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.”

Stunning

Two short essays in…and already close to tears