Noel > Recent Status Updates

“It’s always the chest of the other person we lean back against for support, we only really feel supported or backed up when, as the latter verb itself indicates, there’s someone behind us, someone we perhaps cannot even see and who covers our back with their chest, so close it almost brushes our back and in the end always does, and at times, that someone places a hand on our shoulder, a hand to…”

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A lot of Leopardi’s poetry is entirely uninteresting if you have no national feeling toward Italy. I’ll probably still finish this, though.

“A novel will be the higher and nobler the more inner and less outer life it depicts; and this relation will accompany every grade of novel as its characteristic sign, from Tristram Shandy down to the crudest and most action-packed romance. Tristram Shandy, to be sure, has as good as no action whatever; but how very little action there is in La Nouvelle Héloise and…”

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“The reason the impressions we receive in youth are so significant, the reason why in the dawn of life everything appears to us in so ideal and transfigured a light, is that when we then first become acquainted with the genus, which is still new to us, through the individual, so that every individual thing stands as a representative of its genus: we grasp therein the (Platonic) Idea of this genus,”

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“…waxwork figures make no aesthetic impression and are consequently not works of art (in the aesthetic sense), although when they are well made they produce a far greater illusion of reality than the best picture or statue can and if imitation of the actual were the aim of art would have to be accorded the first rank. For they seem to present not the pure form but with it the material as well,”

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Schopenhauer was a monarchist 🤮

I can’t get over how illogical Schopenhauer’s argument for polygamy is in his diatribe “On Women.” It’s like he completely forgets that men and women are roughly equal in number. If a man takes two wives, that leaves one man without any. If a man takes fifty wives, forty-nine other men have to do without. Given wealth disparities, polygamy inevitably means that poor men will go without wives and…

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I couldn’t decide which quotes I wanted to post. I’m just going to put the best ones here. (I can’t help grinning reading Schopenhauer.)

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By the way, if anyone here uses Letterboxd, my username is the same as on Goodreads. I’m not a very serious user, though. (If we’re friends here and you’ve followed me and I haven’t followed you back, you can let me know.)

https://letterboxd.com/noel02/

I had to order these used from France. I’m pretty sure I’ll love them, though.

After the lilac passage, Proust describes Swann’s garden in a feat of both literary and horticultural virtuosity that climaxes in the narrator’s rapturous communion with the pink blossoms of the hawthorn hedge. Through the hedge, Proust’s narrator could see even deeper into Swann’s garden. There, surrounded by jasmine, verbena, and pansies, sat a little girl. The young narrator, failing to…

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Fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe. It makes laughter the instrument for cheating happiness. To moments of happiness, laughter is foreign; only operettas, and now films, present sex amid peals of merriment. But Baudelaire is as humorless as Hölderlin. In wrong society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality.

The pernicious love of the common people for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities. … It calls for Mickey Rooney rather than the tragic Garbo, Donald Duck rather than Betty Boop.

I also have books by Machen, Blackwood, Smith, Chambers, James, etc., like I said in my reading goals for this year, but Lovecraft seemed like the logical place to start.

Have to return this to the library soon.

The superiority of nature in the competitive struggle is repeatedly confirmed by the very mind which has mastered nature. All bourgeois enlightenment is agreed in its demand for sobriety, respect for facts, a correct appraisal of relative strength. Wishful thinking is banned. The reason, however, is that all power in class society is beset by the gnawing consciousness of its powerlessness in face of…

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The most interesting thing in the last chapter—the most interesting in the book so far—is Bergson’s rejection of the question of where memories are stored. For Bergson: (1) there’s no real distinction between the present and the past—we inhabit an indivisible and heterogenous movement, which he calls “duration”; (2) our thought, like the universe itself, is continually existing, and thus its…

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Sorry, I haven’t been checking my feed at all the past couple weeks. I’ll probably be able to get caught up soon. I had a really nice time in Vancouver. I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. We explored the UBC campus and took the bus downtown the next day. We went to the Vancouver Art Gallery and saw a Nan Goldin exhibit and explored Davie Street (Vancouver’s gay village). I also had a Japadog :)

“You define the present in an arbitrary manner as that which is, whereas the present is simply what is being made. Nothing is less than the present moment, if you understand by that the indivisible limit which divides the past from the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet, and when we think it as existing, it is already past. If, on the other hand, what you…”

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“To picture is not to remember. No doubt a recollection, as it becomes actual, tends to live in an image; however, the converse is not true, and the image, pure and simple, will not be referred to the past unless, indeed, it was in the past that I sought it, thus following the continuous progress which brought it from darkness into light. This is what psychologists too often forget when…”

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This and maybe another Hughes book—The Expendable Man—will be the last American noir I read for now, before beginning my project of forcing my way through Simenon and Manchette in French.

Il me tenait serrée contre lui, soulevée, la tête sur son épaule. En ce moment-là, je l’aimais. Dans la lumière du matin, il était aussi doré, aussi gentil, aussi doux que moi, il me protégeait. Quand sa bouche chercha la mienne, je me mis à trembler de plaisir comme lui et notre baiser fut sans remords et sans honte, seulement une profonde recherche, entrecoupée de murmures.

Sur ce sentiment inconnu dont l’ennui, la douceur m’obsèdent, j’hésite à apposer le nom, le beau nom grave de tristesse. C’est un sentiment si complet, si égoïste que j’en ai presque honte alors que la tristesse m’a toujours paru honorable. Je ne la connaissais pas, elle, mais l’ennui, le regret, plus rarement le remords. Aujourd’hui, quelque chose se replie sur moi comme une soie,

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The guy who sits next to me in my French IV class is THE most obnoxious person I’ve ever met. He wants to be an English teacher abroad so he’s “learning” about half a dozen languages at once. Every so often he’ll interrupt the professor with some banal comparison to some other language. He’ll mutter things under his breath in various languages and quietly burst into random song. He drives me nuts 😤