Z. > Recent Status Updates

(Re)reading this in a heretical, atheistic way, in case any long-time followers are concerned. It does still hold up tho.

“. . . in order to keep power the status quo most get more. But from whom? There is just so much more that can be squeezed out of the Have-Nots—so the Haves must take it from each other. . . . The power cannibalism of the Haves permits only temporary truces, and only when equally confronted by a common enemy. . . . Here is the vulnerable belly of the status quo.”

Every chapter from Grant’s pre-Civil War life is like “I was bad at and did not enjoy being in the military. Everyone pranked me constantly. U.S. imperialism is a crime. *5 pages about horses and/or the tobacco trade*”

The Jeremy Irons reading of this is mostly really lovely, but someone please tell these classically-trained English audiobook narrators to stop pulling out the most godawful cowboy drawl with an overpronounced R any time a North American character enters the scene

Really slogging through this, which is surprising since it was a five-star, paradigm-shifting read for me back in 2018.

“Her song was tedious and outwore the night,
For lovers’ hours are long, though seeming short.
If pleased themselves, others, they think, delight
In such-like circumstance, with such-like sport.
Their copious stories, oftentimes begun,
End without audience, and are never done.”

I’ve loved García Márquez’s shorter works, but this has been a major struggle for me. I never do well with books on the more surrealist side of magical realism, where there’s no clear emotional or narrative logic guiding the events, and this is an especially detail-dense version of that. Individual images and moments are striking but if I hadn’t switched to audio I don’t think I’d be able to finish.

I’ve been known to go to bat for Timon of Athens but Herman Melville really fucking loves Timon of Athens

Henry James was way ahead of the curve by abusing the word “literally” all the way back in 1898

Not to be the kind of person who reads a perennially-relevant work of political commentary/satire and is surprised to find that it's perennially relevant, but this is so relevant right now

Tastefully boring, which I suppose is perfectly fitting for a novel by a long-time New Yorker fiction editor.

I have the worst luck with this book. I’ve started reading it 3 times (1 each for the last 3 summers) and always find it fascinating and well-written but then have to put it down for unrelated reasons. (A new semester the last two years, general lack of focus for any big literary projects now.) I’m sorry Du Bois, the day will come when I’m ready to do this justice.

Taking this slowly (as it deserves) but I’m happy to confirm that almost a decade after my first go-round it’s still one of the best novels I’ve read.

"Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas is my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too."

Honestly starting to question whether I have the stamina for this right now. I’m no stranger to Russian novel marathon pacing but I’m about 70 pages in and sooo disinterested by most of what’s happening. Don’t know what
it is with me and Tolstoy but he’s clearly just not my guy.

Still absolutely hope to clear this one from the docket one day but maybe not the summer right after grad school lol.

‘Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie down and die! Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst wear without fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life!—that have made thee feeble to will and to do!—that will leave thee powerless even to repent! Up, and away!’

"So strangely did they meet, in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread; as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. .... The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment."

"But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it."

"For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane."

I’ve been listening to this casually for two months and have found it a mostly engaging (if often also exasperating) experience, but with 23 hours down and 28 hours left to go one does start to wonder how much Johnson is too much Johnson…

"This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was."

“Like beads on an abacus designed to calculate infinity, cars glided along the lanes of the motorways…”

"[The tents] are strung out in a long line on the margin of the sea, at regular intervals. It is as if the last stragglers of some nomadic people had settled there, at the outermost limit of the earth, in expectation of the miracle longed for since time immemorial, the miracle which would justify all their erstwhile privations and wanderings."

“But—if [what Esther wanted] was to be had at all—it was not to be had without paying a heavy price for it, such as we must pay for all that is greatly good. . . . It is not true that love makes all things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.”

"And while public opinion is what it is—while men have no better beliefs about public duty—while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace—while men are not ashamed in Parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petty private ends,—I say, no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our condition."

“But I don’t think myself a fine fellow because I’m melancholy. I don’t measure my force by the negations within me, and think my soul must be a mighty one because it is more given to idle suffering than to beneficent activity.”

“Did he want her to be heroic? That seemed impossible without some great occasion. Her life was a heap of fragments, and so were her thoughts: some great energy was needed to bind them together.”

“Felix felt himself in danger of getting into a rage. There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.”

"Every sentence was as pleasant to her as if it had been cut in her bared arm. Some men's kindness and love-making are more exasperating, more humiliating than others' derision . . ."