James Tierney > Recent Status Updates

…history doesn’t…line up…like books on a shelf, one thing coming after the next.

I’m not the reader for this book as the religious dimension, relying on a misunderstanding of two Simone Weil quotes, didn’t work for me and the use of a dog’s death was clearly communicated except as unintentional comedy.

‘To be able to hurt others with impunity-for instance to pass our anger on to an inferior who is obliged to be silent—is to spare ourselves from an expenditure of energy, an expenditure which the other person will have to make.’ (Simone Weil)

Humans are bad at valuing the things we are not good at.

Even before I began I knew that whatever I might manage to describe would turn out to be, at best, somewhere to the side of the thing, while the thing itself slipped past me, like the cat you never even see escape when you open the house door.

The wonder of certain coincidences.
Checking the time, I tap my phone, which is sitting on top of a book on my desk, which happens to be Ben Lerner's novel 10:04, and see that the time is 10:04.
Reading about a new movie while holding the cat against my shoulder. At the instant I come to the word vampire, the cat, which has never bitten me before, sinks its teeth in my neck.

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him,
"What are you going through?"
-Simone Weil

epigraph

‘She was sitting on the old wooden bench gazing at the sea. Surrounded by the noise of the children playing nearby. "Children are the birds of paradise," she used to say. Mother would shoot back, "God save us from such birds. They're all noise and no fun.
Oh God, will there be noise in paradise too?"

‘Like their friends, they were unsure whether to admire Hillary Clinton as a woman or despise her for her ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Of course, all that was theoretical; in practice, their social commitment amounted to using Uber only if it was snowing and always leaving tips in cash. They didn't eat tuna.’

‘They worried they were content merely being contented.’

No dialogue (yet). As descriptive as the finest set of instructions you will ever read.

‘Now the Left is just a more reactionary form of common sense.’

One thing rarely equals another, at least not in perfect analogy, but as we try and make things fit, memories form, dissipate, and form again. In this process lives are fleetingly apprehended.’

- Quentin Sprague from ‘The World Is Made Of Layers: Vivienne Bonn’s Looks Towards the Pacific’

The philosophy of life Mrs. Dalloway offers, then, is a powerful vision of life and death not as complete contrasts, but as dependent and dialectical states of being.

…Erich Auerbach ventured as to why Woolf’s writing over-flowed with such ‘good and genuine love but also, in its feminine way, with irony, amorphous sadness, and doubt in life.’

The titles of Bronwyn's works, almost always a single emphatic word, often describe an action or a movement - Wrap, Loop, Twist, Surge. It is as though the shapes have be emanated from the sounds of their names, formed by the opening and closing of the consonants and vowels that describe them.