Abbie Simons > Recent Status Updates

Everything is shadow because everything is light??????????????

Warming up to this

Struggling with this one. Its attitude toward covid is grandiose and exhausting in that particular liberal-arts-academic way, and the name-dropping of all the author’s interesting friends and acquaintances is egregious bordering on ridiculous. I don’t want to be harsh but I’m really struggling to connect with anything here. Feels very out of touch and self-important. TTW might just not be my vibe.

“Energy itself seems to arise out of an even more deeply concealed grid-like patterning of the void of space, which can no longer be viewed as ‘nothing.’”

“First, the mortal king, operating under the mature masculine energy of the King, lived the order in his own life; only secondarily did he enforce it.”

Interesting thus far to see mechanical imagery enter a diary entry about a beetle in the 1660s.

Fear of intimacy chapter took my lunch money

Really appreciate the reframing of “shyness” as a label that is both negative and self-fulfilling. Gonna drop that now, thanks Elaine

Bought this used from thriftbooks, and finding myself moved in a way I can’t explain by the previous owner’s notes in the margins. Adding my own feels like some weird romance. Whoever it is, we’re similar.

“Ricky was a stuffed raccoon with red fur and a black button snout. Two chestnut eyes, loveworn and peeling. I took him everywhere, his long torso slung over my shoulder. With that secret suspicion present in all children, I believed the thing I loved was alive.”

Interesting to realize as I’m reading this: the author’s (valid) insistence on adjusting most pronouns used in excerpts etc (to match historical individuals’ truer gender identity), is really confusing the fuck outta me. I do wonder if this approach will stick culturally because I’m not sure it works, but also appreciate the way it’s forcing me to notice and loosen my expectations.

“The contents of the shelter came from the twilight period of the Age of Enlightenment.”

What I love about this book is the way it reminds me that WE are the ancients of some future civilization. We are rudimentary in ways we don’t know about yet. And much can be lost. But monks will always be monking (potentially)!

I love fixations because I’m suddenly devouring this book after struggling with it for months. Cities are my passion!!!

Some books should have pictures and this is one of those books

I love it

The densest fiction I’ve read in quite some time, and I’m having so much fun :’)

I’m enjoying the challenge of reading this and am taking my time, allowing it to marinate. I notice that aspects of the approach make me bristle, and then once I settle I’m able to take more in. Some aspects are validating/affirming, others are objectively interesting, others don’t interest me much. I’ll keep taking my time with this one and come away with what resonates.

Creative Neglect 🤤

Freakin love this book

“I still fold moments of particular intensity into me. But now I do so with a bit of a spell attached. I promise, I will be ready for you when you find me.”

“What no one is prepared for, however, is the even larger entrance waiting for them, opening into an even greater void.”

“We must progress beyond this tendency to blame the mothers. And we must at the same time become conscious of our anger and frustration, the sense of abandonment we have all known at times, daughters of women in crisis like ourselves. And then, having lived through the shock of acknowledging our rage at the mother, we must learn how to place it in a social context,…” WHEW