Cheryl > Recent Status Updates

“In a Hotel Room in Ithaca

April, the housekeeper,
has left a message for me
hand-written in red ink on a piece of paper.
It is lying next to the coffee maker.
She has written: “Wisdom begins in wonder.”
The quotation is from Socrates.
But the smiley face has been added by April.”

“Bellow learned from Joyce that the stream-of-consciousness gives realism new life, because it absolves realism of having to persuade in the conventional way. ”

“…millions of people…who were suffering or dying right now or had died over the past year and a half in what was after all just the latest plague and whose gone souls swirled invisible in shifting murmurations above every everyday day that we wandered around in, below these figurations, full of what we imagined was purpose.”

Every everyday day…

“the performer has two tasks: one is to do what’s written in the score—incredibly important; and the other, even more important, is to find everything that’s not.”

“The problem with museums like the d’Orsay, by the way and just totally incidentally, is that there’s far too much art, so that no matter how well you plan your route or how noble your intentions, you will always find yourself walking irritably past priceless works of profound genius looking for the bathrooms. And you feel slightly cheapened afterwards, like you’ve let yourself down”

“We must know when to move on. To search too long for perfection can also paralyse.”

“Perhaps there can be no perfection. Only levels of imperfection. Only … differences. Each time we move closer and closer—but can never be satisfied. A piece is never complete, only at some stage abandoned.”

“The episode threw me into a what-is-the-world-coming-to mood, a state I am increasingly prone to these days, prompted by phenomena like Big Brother, four-letter words in the Guardian, vibrating penis rings on sale in Boots, binge-drinkers puking in the city centre on Saturday nights, and chemotherapy for cats and dogs”

“For most people, the era of selfless risk-taking is a phase. It irritates their elders while it lasts...But then, if young persons survive their ideals, something happens which surprises them: they learn a trade, they develop ambitions, they fall in love, they get a stake in life. Or simply time passes, and middle age beckons, with its shoddy compromises”

“The young dream of transcending their circumstances, of shaming the mediocrities around them; of saving lives, of being martyrs. When you have so much future before you, life seems cheap; perhaps you cannot fully imagine, as older people can, being extinguished, simply coming to nothing.”

“Young reviewers become fired with zeal against the established and the over-rated. They think they are doing justice, but it takes them longer to learn about mercy.”

“How does it feel now, then? he said.
Now then, she said. An interesting verbal construct.
A what what? he said.
The past and the present together, she said. Now. Then.”

Exploring Barbara Hepworth online, found this Google doodle just published a week ago

“No, she says. We’re not really that kind of writer.
We’re. Plural. Robert’s chest twinges.”

Loving the word play. Plural. Sounds like Pleural=related to the lining (pleura)covering the lung and chest cavity, which when irritated gives rise to chest pain. Or twinges.

Sacha’s chest filled with the kind of warmth that once when she was really small she’d asked her mother about because it felt so nice and her mother’d said that’s your inner summer.

“Rose passed a tree in the park that was growing to the side so much that it was almost parallel to the ground. It was like a consumptive young lady reclining on a chair. The leaves were like poems that had fallen to the ground.”

“His surface runs deep, for greater knowledge of him offers nothing more than what initially it presents.”

“Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible.”

Most of us spend most of our moral lives in the middle -- sitting on a fence much broader then the gardens on either side. Our days are filled with small acts of cowardice and laziness alternating randomly with small acts of generosity and kindness.

“The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie, or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it—while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show “I can say what I want when I want to.” The power lie conjures a different reality...”

Consider, say, the slow movement of Schubert's B flat Sonata. If you raise your hands to the keyboard in a swift, jerky movement, you've ruined the music before it begins. The few seconds before the first hammer touches the first string are the moments of silence out of which music is born, the breath before the word is spoken.

"As Pascal put it, 'The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.' Few occupations pass the solitary hours more fruitfully than the playing of a musical instrument."
That's the second time today I've heard that quote, the first in the context of Covid-19.

“There is a kind of narcissism we indulge when we first approach a piece of music as strikingly beautiful as the Goldberg Variations. The mess you are making, the actual notes that you are sounding on the keyboard, is lost in the rapture of hearing yourself produce an approximation of the real thing.”