Annie > Recent Status Updates

This would be a fantastic baby shower gift.

I love the author so much. SO good.

“There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, & the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, & virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, & the solution is technique.” CSL

Wow. I want to underline…everything. Our culture’s hatred of dependence—something that is so fundamental to our humanity—really is everywhere. & women, being seen as deficient men with the inconveniences of our body’s natural weaknesses and gifts (namely, our ability to create new life), are prime examples of this and acutely aware of this. And what makes our bodies distinct is targeted w/ hatred b/c of it.

Modern novels are so easy to read. I can just glide through the pages. Haha

Exerting my will to finish this one!

Heresies that the Church worked through to understand the trinity, and that the process was not fruitless: “…all these statements are not so much gravestones as the bricks of a cathedral, which are, of course, only useful when they do not remain alone but are inserted into something bigger, just as even the positively accepted formulas are valid only if they are at the same time aware of their own inadequacy.”

If this was a love story about a progressive licentious woman who challenges the conventional repressed morals of the man engaged to a naive virgin, it would not be worth my time. At the surface level, without reading for detail or symbolism or understanding that this story is meant to be about Old New York and New New York (thus “NewLand Archer”), you could pass it off as thus. I read it wrong the 1st time.

..it becomes evident here how the categories of minimum & maximum, smallest and greatest, change in a perspective of this sort. In a world that in the last analysis is not mathematics but love, the minimum is a maximum; the smallest thing that can love is one of the biggest things; the particular is more than the universal; the person, the unique and unrepeatable, is at the same time the ultimate and highest thing.

-Discussion of how to bridge between the “God of faith” and the “God of the philosophers”

-Phil. paths ultimately fork over the “secret of being”: everything is ultimately material or “all being is ultimately being-thought and can be traced back to mind as the original reality”

-Christianity sides more with the latter, but not entirely so…

A great chapter. I may need to write summary notes for myself…

VIOLENCE I DID NOT EXPECT

Guilted into promising marriage? Dang. If a man is like this before he marries you, be wary of life after marriage… lol

“The strange luminous semi-opacities of fine autumn afternoons and eves intensified into Rembrandt effects the few yellow sunbeams which came through holes and divisions in the canvas, and spirited like jets of gold-dust across the dusky blue atmosphere of haze pervading the tent, until they alighted on inner surfaces of cloth opposite, and shone like little lamps suspended there.”