Jackson Hengsterman > Recent Status Updates

[E]ven nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

DNFing, mowed down 60 pages thinking man this guy’s really smart and then trudged through ten more pages thinking man this guy really knows that he’s really smart

A book about meeting a bunch of different women all of whom mystify you and clearly have some plan in mind that you can never hope to understand. In other words relatable and comforting.

This book is like if Stoner was good

For while an event for which we are longing never happens quite in the way we have been expecting, failing the advantages on which we supposed that we might count, others present themselves for which we never hoped, and make up for our disappointment; and we have been so dreading the worst that in the end we are inclined to feel that, taking one thing with another, chance has, on the whole, been rather kind to us

“I was going through one of those phases of youth, devoid of any particular love…in which at all times and in all places…we desire, we seek, we see Beauty…[T]he glimpse of a woman…enable[s] us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes…and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.”

"You should profit by your youth to learn two things: first, to refrain from expressing sentiments that are too natural not to be taken for granted; and secondly not to rush into speech in reply to things that are said to you before you have penetrated their meaning. If you had taken this precaution a moment ago you would have saved yourself the appearance of speaking at cross-purposes like a deaf man.”

All readers who look at their shelves and are overcome with dread because they know they will never read all the books they want to. The calculations they do. How many books can I read in a lifetime? When I calculate my number I subtract 100 books because I want to devote that time my children. But you don’t need calculations. You only need to read Proust. And maybe Moby-Dick and the Bible. The rest is extra.

I like this so far, so this isn’t a criticism, but has Sally Rooney ever written a funny line?

It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.

Captures a really essential part of grief which is wanting to squeeze your entire being into a small inanimate space

“And of those things we could not speak of we simply said nothing”

It’s brilliant. Sometimes subtly, sometimes starkly, but brilliant all the time. As far as I’m concerned he is the shining star of the Melancholic Canon

Love Girard, love that this book exists, etc. But Haven, God bless her, is clearly a chronicler—not a writer. This sentence—and the book is filled with them—shows what I mean: “Publish or perish is a cliché, but the number and eminence of scholarly articles and books mattered enormously in academic advancement.”
I’m a bit uncharitable because I haven’t eaten today. But still. That’s bad, right?

Don’t think Cusk gets enough credit for her prose. Not many living writers in English beat her on a sentence level.

“Supposing a reader acquainted with the true obiect of the Confessions as here stated, viz. the revelation of dreaming, to have put this question: -
'But how came you to dream more splendidly than others?"
The answer would have been: - 'Because I took excessive quantities of opium.'”

“This was not to say…that she did not experience those exceptional moments when we thirst for something other than what we have, and when people who from a lack of energy or imagination cannot find a source of renewal in themselves ask the next minute that comes, the postman as he rings, to bring them something new, even if it is something worse, some emotion, some sorrow.”

“No, it was because my dreams of travel and of love were only moments—which I am separating artificially today as if I were cutting sections at different heights of an apparently motionless iridescent jet of water—in a single inflexible upsurge of all the forces of my life.”

“At the beach they saw the dredgers and excavators that were strengthening the coast, but they sat down with their feet in the sand because it gave them such a delightful feeling.”