Eric Maas > Recent Status Updates

1.03 First night with Giovanni, at a different bar where Mme Clothilde hosts the darker side of Gay Paris. After which Giovanni invites David to his room. Then back to the lonely night in the south of France, where the caretaker comes to check out, with the old and solid advice of marrying a nice girl and saying a prayer now and then…

…oddly enough, he blushed, which made him, in the light of the pale, just rising sun, resemble a freshly fallen angel .

’…like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.’
I asked him: ‘Why?
‘That you must ask yourself,’ he told me, ‘and perhaps one day this morning will not be ashes in your mouth.’

1.02 Meeting Giovanni.

The flaming princess zombie instantly caused a flashback to the boat scene of Von Aschenbach’s arrival at the Lido in Der Tod in Venedig. This time he comes as a very direct messenger of catastrophe…

Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road —and the road has a truck of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright — and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.

1.01 - Origins. David watching himself in the night that is about to end badly for Giovanni, of whom we know nothing yet. Memories of meeting Hella (gone), Joey (betrayed, deserted), father. With some very lucid thoughts, proving that he has come a long way from self-deception and possibly even self-loathing…

This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all — a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named… (p. 18)

AndI began to cry. And if speaking had been agony, this was worse and yet I could not stop.
And my father’s face changed. It became terribly old and at the same time absolutely, terribly young. I remember being absolutely astonished, at the still, cold center of the storm which was occurring in me, to realize that my father had been suffering, was suffering still.

Fathers ought to avoid utter nakedness before their sons. I did not want to know — not, anyway, from his mouth — that his flesh was as unregenerate as my own . (p. 15)

1.03 - Where the kissing never stops
About Joan Baez and her School for the Study of Non-Violence. The story strikes me as a bit of journalism and I have mixed thoughts about that. Didion seems to remain at a sober distance, to have her own thoughts on the strange practice of management and vision, but never shares those, leaving Baez vulnerable. I see pretension on both sides.

21. Teenage Punk

What did you expect?

…in the soft light of late afternoon her face seemed young and unlined. If i had been stronger, he thought; if I had known more; if I could have understood. And finally, mercilessly, he thought: if I had lived her more. As if it were a long distance it had to go, his hand moved across the sheet that covered him and touched her hand. She didn’t move;…

. (p. 282)

16. Retirement
’My God, Bill,’ Finch said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

And the sense of his loss, that he had for so long dammed within him, flooded out, engulfed him, and he let himself be carried outward, beyond the control of his will; he did not wish to save himself. Then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love .

Stoner came to realize that she was […] almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink .

15. Gracie expecting, marrying the poor sod because Edith ‘s decided after overcoming her initial hysteric shock, leaves for St. Louis and is being widowed because the sod goes off to fight Japan…

Slightly confused that Stoner doesn’t draw a line here like with Walker and Lomax; Edith is so obviously wrong with her radical, all too forward solution. Still, with her, Stoner complies…

14. Older, saddened, but not beaten just yet

It was a triumph in a way, but one of which he always remained amusedly contemptuous, as if it were a victory won by boredom and indifference.

13. The cheerfulness of an honest and equal love and the inevitable end.

It’s a beautiful chapter, through which I had to force my way, knowing that plain happiness was to be sacrificed. Still, I do think, this is the well-ended narrative I could have wished for both Stoner and Katherine: at least they are in peace with each other. But there’s no forgiveness for Hollis Lomax, as far as I’m concerned…

…it isn’t Edith or even Grace, or the certainty of losing Grace, that keeps me here; it isn’t the scandal or the hurt to you or me; it isn’t the hardship we would have to go though, or even the loss of love we might have to face. It’s simply the destruction of ourselves, of what we do.

…and he watched with immeasurable sadness their last effort of gaiety, which was like a dance that life makes upon the body of death. (p. 220)

12. Closer to Katherine Driscoll
For better or for worse, whatever may come from this, I’m glad this kind and warm intimacy happens to Stoner. Bless him, bless her and them both and pray it goes well or, if need be, will end well…

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another. (p. 199)

He wondered at the foolishness that drove men to do the things they did.

11. Lomax’ outrageous grudge

Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, too suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed…

10. The dismissal of Charles Walker. And how Lomax’s grudge towards Stoner got to get out in the open

I applaud Stoner for sticking to his opinion of Walker. The student is so clearly opposed to everything he stands for, that he doesn’t even fit a second feel the temptation to give in. Regardless of consequences. That he doesn’t get support from Edith for being a man of integrity makes it even sadder.