Andrew Marr > Recent Status Updates

I guess I’m reading this now

Got halfway through this a year ago and put it down. I am picking this up again, and man, do I love it. So mercurial a story, yet so beautiful. Excited to read both works

Not gonna lie, this book is too long, and it’s not becoming more interesting.

I’d be more motivated to finish if the book was shorter.

I don’t think my thought that it is too long is a phallocentric reading of a long work by a woman, which is what Ellmann typically claims when asked about the length. I just think the book would be better if it was edited to 3-500 pgs.

I’m reading this bad boy again!

“Everything militates toward separation of the classes. The places where we never go are the invisible places, and it is the business of police authority, economic pressure, self-preservation and simple habit to place aliens there, so that they become invisible.”

Well into the book and I am my pretty confident I don’t understand a single thing that’s happened so far.

I wish Jordan Peterson wasn’t the guy popularizing this fantastic work, but here we are.

A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion. . .

This is fun and quick to read, but aspires to the WASP-y hyperintellectualism of some of my heroes (Gass, Pynchon, etc.). The book can’t achieve it. At its worst it reads like the digressive musings of an over eager undergraduate. At its best, the lyricism, language, and philosophical musings on language and consciousness are unique - albeit not unheard of - takes from an interesting point of view.

what everyone else is doing, just better

Ponge-like, this book further shows to me how Knausgaard is one of the most visionary and brilliant writers alive.

The number of a class is the class of all those classes that are similar to it.

Take that, JS Mill!

bertie showing dat logicism bias early on

"The terms which occur can be defined by means of the natural numbers, and the propositions can be deduced from the properties of the natural numbers – with the addition, in each case, of the ideas and propositions of pure logic."

...and nothing's begun; because we're in that fabled place where compacts of conclusion coalesce like veins of coal, compressed past the thought of further futures and consequently beyond each form of the past, to be free of time like the proverbial bird, fixed...that's what we really don't know and maybe motivates my burrowing–if there's a bottom nature, just what's what where the well ends, when we pass beneath...

We sail the seas and fly the skies and drive up and down all the roads, but the deepest caves, the cleverest caverns, cannot take us to the underground, tell us what goes on in that inner realm, however it happens, whether it's as we think, ever so slowly, and life sleeps upside down there like bats, or whether, at the genetic center of the self, in pure birth earth, there is no need for any action and all is over...

"[S]ympathies in such a cause are not idly, not routinely, not frequently enlisted; and were they to be, what then? what would one learn about oneself? would the soul's hairs rise like a frightened animal's? would one, one day during the exercise, feel that formerly feckless fist smash a hated face into blissfully bloody bits, sense softness at the end of the blows as the cheekbones give...?" (pg 463)

"Identifying with the victims, and hence engorged by pity, writers on the Third Reich–before my example–have never troubled to put themselves in the villains' place, to imagine the unimaginable–it is easy to be a victim, you don't have to do a thing, you simply weep and bleed–but, ah, the beater, to be the beater is not a role whose easy mastery is readily admittable..."

When will this effing thing end

“I remember my relief when my paving block broke the pane of the second shop, the shop of a goy. You see, I said to my cold soul. For my part, [Kristallnacht] wasn’t just Jews.”