Christina > Recent Status Updates

Barnes has added to my growing stacks of books to look into: Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier and any later work by Penelope Fitzgerald. I think I'll skip Orwell's writing about the fucking elephant, but Barnes' chapter on that made me laugh.

'Well, Teresa, he said, this is Wicklow, this is March, what were you expecting exactly? This isn't the Canaries we're talking about. Anyway, you don't feel it with the fleece on you. From the way you were going on, the two of you, I thought you were well used to the hills. Hah? This is what I was led to believe, Teresa.'

Barnes on Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier being called 'the finest French novel in the English language':

'If readers can be put off by titles (I resisted The Catcher in the Rye for many years, imagining it to be a prairie baseball novel) so they can by hyping tags. What's the point of writing a French novel in English? you might roughly ask.'

'In 'England, Your England' he denounces the left-wing English intelligentsia for being 'generally negative' and 'querulous': adjectives which from this distance seem to fit Orwell pretty aptly. Given that he died at the age of forty-six, it's scary to imagine the crustiness that might have set in had he reached pensionable age.'

'Getting its history wrong', wrote Ernest Renan, 'is part of being a nation.' Pointedly, he said, 'being' not 'becoming': the self-delusion is a constant requirement, not just part of a state's initial creation myth. Similarly, getting its iconic figures wrong - and rebranding them at intervals - is part of being a nation. The Orwell whom the English have sanctified is a descendant of...Dr Johnson.

'So Amours de Voyage – this great long poem which is also a great short novella – is in the end about failure, about not seizing the day, about misreading and overanalysing, about cowardice. But cowardice is generally more interesting to the writer than courage, as failure is more exciting than success...'

'Ēalā, dear reader! Enter. The wordhord is unlocked.'

"But," Buttercup said then, trying for frivolity, "thus far, the unalloyed fact that shines out is this: we have only kissed."
   "What else is there?" Westley asked. He touched his lips lightly to her cheek. "Surely there could be nothing more?"
   This was somewhat disingenuous on his part, because he had been King of the Sea for several years, and, well, things happened.

'Inigo was in Despair.
    Hard to find on a map (this was after maps) not because cartographers didn't know of its existence, but because when they visited to measure its precise dimensions, they became so depressed they began to drink and question everything, most notably why would anyone want to be something as stupid as a cartographer?'

'True, he [Fezzik] had climbed the Cliffs of Insanity, but that was different. He'd had a rope to hold on to so he knew which way to go, and he'd had Vizzini insulting him, which always made the time pass more pleasantly.'

"We need a miracle; it's very important," the skinny guy said from outside.
  "I'm retired," Max said, "anyway, you wouldn't want someone the King got rid of, would you? I might kill whoever you want me to miracle."
  "He's already dead," the skinny guy said.
  "He is, huh?" Max said, a little interest in his voice now. He opened the door a peek's worth again. "I'm good at dead."

'Falkbridge was by far the most powerful man in the Thieves Quarter. He seemed almost to own half of it and there wasn't a crime of any dimension he wasn't behind. He always avoided arrest, and everyone except Yellin thought Falkbridge must be bribing somebody. Yellin knew he was bribing somebody, since every month, rain or shine, Falkbridge came to Yellin's house and gave him a satchel full of money.'

"Fool!" cried the hunchback. "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is, 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.'"
   He was quite cheery until the iocane powder took effect.

'So you can either marry me and be the richest and most powerful woman in a thousand miles and give turkeys away at Christmas and provide me a son, or you can die in terrible pain in the very near future. Make up your own mind."
"I'll never love you."
"I wouldn't want it if I had it."
"Then by all means let us marry.'

'The image of the empty house also recurs in the Proustian moment in the final pages when Alex stares at Sasha's old apartment and "imagined..finding himself still there." The poignancy of Egan's image - as well as of Proust's original one - lies in the noncorrespondence of time; what one looks for (one's younger self or experiences) is inevitably missing, producing an effect of emptiness.'

'Alex's note, "the edges torn, the pale blue lines rubbed almost away," could also be described as..."over-handled." The adjective raises larger questions: how much or often should a "tale" be told, and for how long? How much "handling" can a narrative bear? Does a story wear down under excessive use? And who has the right to "handle" or to retell others' stories?'

'What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?
   You shut down for the night and go home to your wife, right? You have a martini, order dinner. You read or watch television.
   You are Brueghel's tiny Icarus, drowning unnoticed in a corner of a vast canvas on which men till fields and tend sheep.'

"Groff is new to you, right?"
   "Yeah. He's not actually officially one of my artists yet. We're trying each other out."
   Never lie to these people. They hate, above all, being deceived by the help.'

'The train from Grand Central to Greenwich runs through a morass of exurbia that, let's just say, one would want to conceal from a visiting extraterrestrial. ...The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg would not be entirely out of place here.'

"...He's having dinner with a friend. Some girl he used to know."
   "Are we . . . . concerned about that?"
   "We're a little concerned about everything. He seems slightly funny to me this time."
   He's doing drugs again, Rebecca. Peter Harris, tell your wife that her little brother is back on drugs. Do it now.
   "Funnier than usual?" he asks.

'As Heidegger also pointed out in his analysis of our technological culture, the tool invites us to enter into an instrumental relationship with the world, one that reveals objects as standing reserves for human intentions. That is all well and good as long as it doesn't lead to an absolutist understanding of the world.'

'Peter tried to murder his brother only once, which, by the standards of brothers, is modest. He was seven, which would have made Matthew ten.'

'In [Hannah] Arendt's sense, thinking includes conscience, in the form of attention and thoughtfulness towards other people. This was an attribute sorely lacking in [Adolf] Eichmann, who had turned himself into an unthinking cog in a machine, obeying orders. You can, of course, have a high IQ without thinking very much in Arendt's sense of the word – and vice versa.'

'...it's all well and good to 'realize yourself' as a unique individual, but not at the expense of the universal human values and obligations from which ethics originate. To put it bluntly, it is fine to be yourself, but not if that means you're a bad person.'

'It is no longer good enough to do something well. Everything must constantly be better – or indeed 'even better'. This is where my defense of thoughtfulness may be relevant to the discussion of depression. It is no coincidence that the sales slogan for the antidepressant 'happy pill' Paxil was 'Do more, feel better, live longer'. And think less?'

'Thinking that generates meaning is about everything we don't know – but it often takes a great deal of knowledge to understand how little we actually know. It takes courage to stand by the idea that there's something we don't know, and it takes curiosity to want to learn more.'

'...it is normal to memorialize and document happy or successful moments, but if those memorials seem to occupy too much of your present day, it is a likely sign that you may have no new moments worth memorializing or remembering.'

'Peter lets himself into the loft. Quarter past four. He goes to the kitchen counter, puts down the drugstore bag that contains the Excedrin and dental floss he's picked up (why is it so impossible to go out in New York without buying something?), slips off his jacket, hangs it up.'

'...the more technology simplifies things and improves efficiency, the more difficult it is to think because thinking depends on the ability not to react in a knee-jerk manner, to postpone decisions, consult other people, to listen to their experiences and arguments and consider the matter properly.

'When watching The X-Factor and munching popcorn, you experience the taste of the popcorn and the sound of the songs, but it is only once you become aware that you are experiencing these things that you can be said to be starting to think. There may then be a risk of you wondering whether this is a worthwhile use of your time – and that may not be a pleasant experience.'