Dominique > Recent Status Updates

Is this what Merleau-Ponty was so afraid of? Is this Descartes' legacy? The delirium of pure abstraction applied to the human soul?

So, I'm basically like two pages into the introduction by Myra Bergman Ramos when they use the term "culturally schizophrenic" (sighs)... Look, I know this was written in a different time (2014), a different era (21st century), but it just seems a little tone-deaf to be writing about how this book about oppression opened your eyes to the plight of the oppressed and then use a stigmatised mental condition as analogy

Extremely heavy-handed with the symbolism. How many chapters must I read on how the child-bride and a caged-tiger resemble each other? We get it. She’s not like the other girls (her sisters). She’s special. She can draw. Her mum was thinking of maps when she was conceived (so wild). Blah blah blah. What do I care? You don’t need to be special to be murdered by your spouse. How does any of this matter?

"Say her name."

This is how it feels like to be pulled in two directions, to be caught somewhere inbetween. I'm British and Colombian, too Colombian for my British family, too British for my Colombian family. One looks down on me, the other envies me. For one, I represent barbarity. For the other, oppression. I can't speak without betraying everyone I know.

This book has done a lot for me so far. I've not only understood how some of my current behaviours stem from developmental trauma, but also from an environment that has increasingly isolated me from the interactions I need to heal. Since picking up this book, I've also learned I am an addict, an addict to binge eating. I do it because, for a brief moment, warm delicious food makes me feel safe. Hence, my weight yoyos

NO HAMISH NOOOOOOOOO

"When trees are really hungry, they begin to scream."

Everything about the way the protagonist loves Fermina frightens me. Watching him gorge himself on rose petals and write 60 page love-notes to a girl he has barely even spoken to makes the hair on the back of my neck prickle to attention. I am so glad to know she marries someone else...

Satan is hot. (Or maybe that's the point?)

I know this world, I spent years trying to run away from it, and now it seems I am being thrown back in by this book. For those who have not lived it, this is surely a fascinating read but for me, it's an old wound. I don't know if I will go so far as to open it again, I don't know if I will follow this book till the end. I know how it ends, whatever happens.

I cannot stop crying.

This book is triggering me.

"Most of the English middle class are trained for war from the cradle onwards, not technically but morally."

This is true even now. Why else was there a junior cadet force at my senior school? Why else was I learning to camouflage myself and shoot a rifle at 13 years old?

"Well into this century it was usual for ‘free’ patients at the big hospitals to have their teeth extracted with no anaesthetic. They didn’t pay, so why should they have an anaesthetic — that was the attitude. That too has changed."

Ha! So you would think Orwell, but actually, I had a tooth drilled into without anaesthetic because I was on a pauper's health insurance. And it's the twenty-first century.

"Natural’ death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful. Even at that, it makes a difference if you can achieve it in your own home and not in a public institution."

Thank God for THIS BOOK! Thank you Michael Della Rocca. The introduction just solved all my issues. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!!!!!!!

"After experience had taught me that all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile [...] I resolved, at last, to try to find out [...] whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy to eternity" (p. 13)

Every day I am more convinced that philosophy is not born out of wonder but suffering. This sounds like a coping method to me.

I respect Kant, I recognise his genius, but honestly, I never wanted to read him again. I hate this (Spinoza) class so much for forcing me to do this...

I think I hate Spinoza...