Joe1207 > Recent Status Updates

My last Kafka

I joined Goodreads ten years ago this month. There were only four million accounts. It wasn't owned by Amazon. You couldn't link social media, hence my name. I didn't have a sense of direction or purpose. But I devoured this website. I remembered I loved to read. I switched majors from Psych to English. I'm a copywriter. I often wonder about the Joey who missed his Point of Divergence. I don't want to meet him.

"During its final two weeks, [Moses'] campaign was almost entirely a campaign ad homines, an exercise in wholesale insinuation and vituperation. Seeing his hopes for elective office vanishing, he spewed venom over his opponents.

When the candidate rose to speak, he saw, looming on him from the balcony, thousands of empty seats."

From Caro's lips to God's ears.

The emotional roller coaster continues.

Learning about actual witch hunts

“Claude used to lie there and watch the clouds, saying to himself, ‘It’s the end of everything for me.’ Other men than he must have been disappointed, and he wondered how they bore it through a lifetime. Claude had been a well-behaved boy because he was an idealist; he had looked forward to being wonderfully happy in love, and to deserve his happiness. He had never dreamed that it might be otherwise.”

“Ricardo Reis reads the newspapers. He remains unperturbed by the world news that reaches him, perhaps because of his temperament, or perhaps because he believes in the popular superstition which says that the more one cries doom, the less doom occurs. If this is true, then man should embrace pessimism as the surest road to happiness, and perhaps by persevering in his fear of death he may attain immortality.”

“And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.”
Big mood

"Most educated people would be ashamed to admit they don't know the difference between Hamlet and King Lear, but they might jovially brag that they don't know a gene from a chromosome or relativity theory from the uncertainty principle. When people tell me that they think science is too difficult but that they love Hamlet, I sometimes ask them: But does Hamlet love Ophelia?"

“The fifteenth century of Leonardo and Columbus and Gutenberg was a time of invention, exploration, and the spread of knowledge by new technologies. In short, it was a time like our own.”

“History makes harsh demands of us all. But they were demands that had to be met if men were to be the masters and not the victims of their times.”

"Maiden lady that I am, I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference."

Who the hell is Edith Pearlman and why are these some of the best short stories I’ve ever read.

“But what you’ve never understood is how the best educated Dominicans, the intellectuals of the country, the lawyers, doctors, engineers, often graduates of very good universities in the United States or Europe, sensitive, cultivated men of experience, wide reading, ideas, presumably possessing a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, men of feeling and scruples, could allow themselves to be...savagely abused.”

"Urania. Her parents had done her no favor; her name suggested a planet, a mineral, anything but the slender, fine-featured woman with burnished skin and large, dark, rather sad eyes who looked back at her from the mirror. Urania! What an idea for a name. Fortunately nobody called her that anymore; now it was Uri, Miss Cabral, Ms. Cabral, Dr. Cabral."
Reminds me of Lolita.

"These were Corinne's alone-thoughts. Thoughts she was only susceptible to when alone."

Oh boy, here we go.

“In writing this book, it was not my intention to write a parable for our time. But the story I tell is an old one, the story of what happens when some institution—a church, say, or a government—decides to rid itself of someone who has become anathema to it, or when it wants to change course without saying so openly.”

Come very close, lay your hand on the stone, and you sense telltale signs of past lives: quarry marks, sharp chisel scores and careful graffiti, neatly laid lines of mortar. You stand just where the nameless builder once stood, your hands where his hands were, as he shaped each stone and set it in place. The stones still stand for the people who built them...They are the weatherworn bodies of our myths.