Sara Mobarak > Recent Status Updates

“From this enormous mass stretching to the edge of the plain, a single thought, beyond all power of human expression, bore down like a great, heavy ring of iron on the center.”

“The pleasure of disappointment. It wasn't new to me. I had been relishing it ever since I was eight years old, a boarder in my first, religious, school. And perhaps they were the best years, I thought. Those years of dis-cipline. There was a kind of elation, faint but constant throughout all those days of discipline, the sweet days of discipline.”

“These moments seem so long, the nightly waiting as, before falling asleep, you have to invite a dream to come.”

“Of course it's quite common to buy an old book and find petals between the pages, petals that crumble to dust as soon as you touch them. Sick petals. Grave flowers.”

“In the same way twenty-first-century adults would grow comfortable with classifying their
OWN personalities as "brands," late-twentieth-century adults nonchalantly accepted the possibility that their principal social function was to serve as consumers.”

On dial up:

The sound of the insurrection was not musical. The sound of the insurrection was annoying, until it was begrudgingly zapped into nonexistence and turned into a thirty-two-second YouTube demonstration of nostalgia induction.

Their manufactured realities were lifelike, but not transposable with life itself. They demanded to be seen (and considered) as isolated and nontransferable. Time and again, the movie was about the movie.

The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success. The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money. Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.

“It is for Asta Sollilja and her beloved that cheap poets and misanthropists and liars write books full of sunshine and dreams and beautiful sun-gilt palm-avenues to fool them and ridicule them and insult them. All that her loved one possessed were these dreams. And the ability to drink himself stupid.”

“The ship that in autumn lies deserted on the shore, rudderless, mastless, used no more; the bird that cowers low in shelter, likewise in the autumn, featherless and forlorn, driven before the storm; the harp that hangs trembling on the wall, silently mourning its owner's fall-all this was her poetry, all this she understood.”

Hard to review the first part of a trilogy, but there is so much I loved about John Banville’s Eclipse. In many aspects I am also confused. Not sure how much of that is my own shortcoming (I read this in a haze), but John Banville writes like an angel.
Will try to find time to do a proper review.

“On such days, autumn is already sounding its first horn-calls, yet the summer still blithely believes it will never end. In that dreamy stillness, like the stillness in the azure distances of a stage set, all the summers back to childhood seem present; to childhood, and beyond childhood, to those Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge.”

“In my table of types, beauty does not make eligible nor ugliness disqualify. Indeed, ugliness and beauty are not categories that apply here—my questing gaze makes no aesthetic measurements.”

“I see him, ashen, lost inside his clothes, and always, like me now, with a three-day stubble, moving wraithlike without sound through rooms gaunt with summer's stillness, a stooped figure flickering from sunlight into shadow, fading with no footfall, leaving no trace of his passing save a sort of shimmer, a fold in the air, and a coiling question mark of cigarette smoke.”

“A spasm of sweetish sadness made my mind droop; I thought perhaps Lydia was right, perhaps I am a sentimentalist. I brooded on words. Sentimentality: unearned emotion. Nostalgia: longing for what never was.”

“No one moves more daintily than the giant, though it is always he who comes crashing down the beanstalk or has his eye put out with a burning brand. All this I learned, and learned to play. It was one of the secrets of my success, onstage and off, that I could put on size.”

“The varied life implicit in all this noise affected the bewildered child with a sad sense of her own isolation, her own insignificance; she stood outside the boundaries of life; this great house was to her comparable in its way with the book about the secrets of love, full of seductive charm, but closed.”

“It was a string in his breast that snapped, one of those delicate childhood strings which break before one has had time to realize that they are
capable of sounding; and these strings sound no more; henceforth they are only a memory of incredible days.”

“All she felt was surprise. She could not understand the woman who had risen that morning from her bed, sleepless, armed like Death with a scythe. She put on her clothes, pinned a shawl round her head and shoulders, and was the same woman as yesterday; but the sheep had stopped bleating.”

Someone at the library has been hoarding an edition of Independent People by Halldór Laxness. I made the mistake of reading the sample and felt a strange temporal loyalty to it, now I just can’t bring myself to read anything else until they’re done with it.
It’s Bjartur of Summerhouses or nothing.

“Each curve had its own tone, but not one of them was dull; the brook was merry and music-loving, like youth, but yet with various strings, and it played its music without thought of any audience and did not care though no one heard for a hundred years, like the true poet.”

None the less, Wilder welcomed and understood the night - only in the darkness could one become sufficiently obsessive, deliberately play on all one's repressed instincts. He welcomed this forced conscription of the deviant strains in his character. Happily, this free and degenerate behaviour became easier the higher he moved up the building, as if encouraged by the secret logic of the high-rise.

Library card renewed, a few setbacks too. Hoping for portals, thresholds and time enough for a bit of make-believe.