jacob > Recent Status Updates

"The imagined lords it over the actual . . . The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist . . . [W]e embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them."

"But how strange, even awkward, it was to say for the first time 'I love you' to an old friend. It was done, we had crossed the line and made a promise, one that we would have found difficult to define. We would not always be standing here in a rhapsodic state, arms looped around the other's neck, deep in warm clear seawater in beautiful evening sunlight with no one around . . ."

"I'd like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we'll know everything."

"In English, approximately 30,000 classics of literature, television and film press in on us, with more to be rediscovered. Vastly more numerous are the barely lesser works . . . It is hard now to regret that artificial intelligence did not add substantially to the pile before man-made disasters slowed its progress."

A bit pat, McEwan, and a bit too optimistic, I'm afraid. But, time will tell.

"‘I’ve never hated him. Never! But.’ You might try to guess at the truncated final sentence or gaze at the middle letter of ‘but’ as though it might swing open on its hinges to reveal a peephole through which you could see a disappointed heart, reduced by lost opportunities."

LOL: "But" working hard for this lady. Anyway, here we have an intriguing parallel: For one, Vivien of the disappointed heart, thwarted . . .

"Early on, she had kept herself ‘sensible’ researching her second book . . ."

"Sensible" can mean:

1) "rational, reasonable," or,
2) "emotionally aware & responsive," or,
3) "conscious," or,
4) "perceptible as real or material: substantial"

It is meant, here, of course, in all 4 senses—& perhaps in more, e.g. 5) "practical".

Clever woman. And clever McEwan! Golly, I adore lexical and connotative precision! ✨

". . .the twelve volumes of Vivien Blundy’s journals . . . which, for reasons scholars have never resolved, once rested marsupially within her husband’s."

LOL "rested marsupially": so this McEwan feller can turn a phrase, eh? Wink. Anyway, sounds like a sort of kinetic metaphor for wife as property. On marriage, after all, "I now pronounce you *man* & wife": man stays man—woman alchemically converted to wife.

"I ate gazing at my skeletons."

This novel is—and this is no complaint—near humorless. But, in plumbing the depths of existential absurdity, it does offer a few laughs. Like this line. Who ever dreamt of putting these words together? I can't imagine a writer doesn't chuckle to themselves in crafting a line like this; it's just so delightfully bizarre—even in its full context.

A+. New favorite sentence: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.

". . . [W]e had understood that the guards didn't want to give us any clues as to the reasons for our captivity and our being kept alive, but we'd always assumed that they knew. What if they were as much in the dark as we were? What if they were forced to do a job that they weren't permitted to understand? . . ."

"Sitting on the bench, gazing towards the setting sun, she lost her mind in the cerebral convolutions . . . she had gone backwards, seeking a world that made sense, losing her way among the labyrinths, slowly deteriorating, dimming . . . fading away so gradually that it was impossible to pinpoint the transition . . . I let out a deep sigh. My last tie had been cut."

"One after the other, they were buried under that sky and neither they nor I knew if it was the one under which we'd been born."

". . . [W]e walked on until sunset, thirty-nine women and a corpse, a long, straggling column crossing the plain, a silent procession through the impossible, unwillingly taking possession of the void . . ."

"In this work . . . Austen's position [is] essentially liberal & acutely prescient by showing the enormous burden that the modern Western world places on individual moral choice . . . Courtship becomes the arena in which choices may not be obviously right or wrong, good or bad, until proved out consequentially . . . Each individual cannot fall back on an external checklist or on an authoritarian moral advisor . . ."

". . . [W]e . . . lined up . . . forty live women staring at the forty dead women . . . So we hadn't been the only prisoners . . . [W]e found ourselves plunged even deeper into the absurd . . . [T]hey were our equals, our less fortunate doubles."

And one of the dead is our protagonist's individual double: the woman who died last, after watching—& hearing, & smelling, & being trapped with—all the others' deaths.

"'Perhaps, Anne rationalizes . . . 'this was one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides.'

This is an extraordinary statement! How can a subsequent event be the determinant of whether a moral decision is right or wrong? . . . Is Anne Elliot merely assuming a providential universe in which whatever happens is right? . . ."

"These thoughts came to me with dazzling certainty . . . Where did they come from? . . . I only know that I derived enormous pleasure from what was going on in my mind."

So far I most enjoy the way Harpman probes questions around the pleasures, pains, and processes inherent to the act of thought.

'And we'll never be any the wiser. We will die, one by one, as age gets the better of us . . . You will be the last.'

. . . Since I had greatly exercised my imagination of late, I could guess her thoughts: one day, I would be alone . . . In the morning, a guard would pass me my food, which I'd cook on the hot plate, & I'd eat, sleep & die alone, without having understood our fate or why it had been inflicted on us."

"'Answer me with your own thoughts. If you have any.' . . .
'What's the use of talking about it? . . .'
'There you go again with your stupidity! As if talking only served to make things happen. Talking is existing . . .'
'But will talking teach us anything about what we are doing here? You have no more idea than I . . .'
'True, but . . .we'll feel as if we're behaving like human beings . . .'"

"As they scrubbed the vegetables, the women argued noisily over how they were going to cook them . . . [A]nyone would think that they had the choice between several recipes . . . whereas in fact . . . there was never any option but to boil [them] . . . This was probably their way of telling one another stories . . . human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity . . ."

"As soon as Caleb told me what was going on . . . he had effectively handed the problem over to me. That was, after all, how all good marriages worked. My husband moved instinctually through the world, he did the things he wanted to do & didn't do the things he didn't want to do, & I . . . trailed beatifically in front of & behind him, sweeping the ground clean . . . & then . . . sweeping away his messy footprints."

". . . [T]hat truffle pasta. The strangest flavor I'd ever encountered. Terrible yet mouth-watering . . . I went online & learned about the pigs who were trained to seek those delicacies in the wild. The smell was so intoxicating to them, it nearly drove them mad.

People aren't so different from pigs . . . Once they learn a rotten thing can be eaten, they will eat it and then they will become addicted to it . . ."

"She was right, of course. I'd known it all along, in the quietest part of me: we were failing at make believe . . . We could fool our loved ones from afar, but up close, you could smell it. Something rotten in the air."

"In fact it would be several years before I realized that the laws of social media were the same as the laws of physics, equal parts invisible and accumulative in their power. Like the scientists who first discovered the atom: how could they have possibly known that the identification of something so small, so elemental, could one day lead to the nuclear bomb?"

"Seitz, Singer, [William] Nierenberg, and [Robert] Jastrow had all served in high levels of science administration, where they had come to know admirals and generals, congressmen and senators, even presidents. They had also dealt extensively with the media, so they knew how to get press coverage for their views, and how to pressure the media when they didn't . . .

"A handful of men would have had no impact if no one had paid any attention, but people did pay attention. By virtue of their earlier work in the Cold War weapons programs, these men were well-known and highly respected in Washington, D.C., and had access to power all the way to the White House.

It wasn't just the Bush administration that took these claims seriously; the mass media did, too . . ."

"In case after case, Fred Singer and Fred Seitz, and a handful of other scientists joined forces with think tanks and private corporations to challenge scientific evidence on a host of contemporary issues . . . They claimed the link between smoking and cancer remained unproven . . . that acid rain was caused by volcanoes, and so was the ozone hole . . ."

"Was Anne right to give in to the 'persuasion' of Lady Russell? There is rich ambiguity or hesitation here, & phrases such as 'the fair interference of friendship' in their poised ambivalence indicate that Jane Austen knew all about the multiple motivations which are at work in the impulse to exert some apparently beneficent control over a person in a weaker position."

—extract from "Jane Austen," Tony Tanner (1986)

"Did Jane Austen know how good she was? It is a question often asked by her aficionados . . . Here is the reason why that question . . . is irresistible: she did things with fiction . . . with character, with dialogue, with English sentences, that had never been done before . . . [S]he was in some ways the most surprising genius of English Literature. She lived in an age distinguished by its literary intimacies . . .

"Imagine the millions of folks who'd passed through here. Over the last, say, thousand years. You couldn't. The mind wouldn't hold it. He'd been part of that. The long march of history. Not such a small part, either. No: in a relative sense, he'd been more important than many (most) of those million souls. In terms of influence-on-world . . ."

". . . [T]hey discussed the consequences of Heisenberg's discovery, which Bohr saw as the cornerstone upon which a truly new physics could be founded. In philosophical terms . . . this was the end of determinism. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised . . ."