Noel > Recent Status Updates

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived,

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Honesty of evil thoughts. Yesterday evening I felt especially miserable. My stomach was upset again. I had written with difficulty. I had listened with effort to Löwy’s reading in the coffee-house (which at first was quiet so that we had to restrain ourselves, but which then became full of bustle and gave us no peace), the dismal future immediately before me seemed not worth entering, abandoned, I walked

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It is certain that a major obstacle to my progress is my physical condition. Nothing can be accomplished with such a body. I shall have to get used to its perpetual balking. As a result of the last few nights spent in wild dreams but with scarcely a few snatches of sleep, I was so incoherent this morning, felt nothing but my forehead, saw a halfway bearable condition only far beyond my present one, and in

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But, as our attention has distinguished and separated them [“mental states”] artificially, it is obliged next to reunite them by an artificial bond. It imagines, therefore, a formless ego, indifferent and unchangeable, on which it threads the psychic states which it has set up as independent entities. Instead of a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other, it perceives distinct and, so to speak,…

I should have started this after Matter and Memory; I was just totally put off by the idea of a “life force.” But then again I totally disagreed with Bergson’s argument in Matter and Memory that memories are purely “spiritual,” without a physical substratum, and that didn’t hamper my enjoyment of the book, so hopefully I’ll be able to put aside my prejudices against this one.

I just got the strangest comment on my review for The Second Sex accusing me of being a “woman in digital blackface” and using AI and criticizing me for ignoring the trauma of daughter-daughter relationships in the name of femininity (or something like that). I feel like it must have been a bot because it made no sense, although I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

I will go now into the library and take out some book, and read and look; and read again and look. Here is a poem about a hedge. I will wander down it and pick flowers, green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May, wild roses and ivy serpentine. I will clasp them in my hands and lay them on the desk’s shiny surface. I will sit by the river’s trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad and bright, which…

I sink down on the black plumes of sleep; its thick wings are pressed to my eyes. Travelling through darkness I see the stretched flower-beds, and Mrs Constable runs from behind the corner of the pampas-grass to say my aunt has come to fetch me in a carriage. I mount; I escape; I rise on spring-heeled boots over the tree-tops. But I am now fallen into the carriage at the hall door, where she sits nodding yellow…

Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join so and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying, “Oh save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time!”

At last 🥳 Surprisingly, I had a much easier time reading this than I did reading Le Petit Prince last year. But then, I was at A2 and I think that book is really B1. This book is definitely B2, so it really was “comprehensible input.” What shook me up the most was Sagan’s use of the imperfect subjunctive (“la seule que je possédasse…”) and the past perfect subjunctive(?) (“il m’eût rassurée…”). The latter…

Deuxième partie. Have the next two days off so will focus on finishing it then. (The last part ended on a very tense note; it’s remarkable that an eighteen-year-old could depict such complicated relationships between her characters.)

Starting over. It’s not quite as opaque to me as it was six months ago. (Then I had to look up like ten words a page; this time two or three.) I simply HAVE to practice because every day I physically feel the French slipping through my fingers…

Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one’s perceptions, halfway to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh? or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all? Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was. But if they knew, could they tell one what they knew?

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“…and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things…”

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‘Yes, it’s going to be dam’ good, said Mr Mybug. It’s a psychological study, of course, and I’ve got a lot of new matter, including three letters he wrote to an old aunt in Ireland, Mrs Prunty, during the period when he was working on “Wuthering Heights”.’

He glanced sharply at Flora to see if she would react…

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That audience had run to beards and magenta shirts and original ways of arranging its neckwear; and not content with the ravages produced in its over-excitable nervous system by the remorseless workings of its critical intelligence, it had sat through a film of Japanese life called ‘Yěs’, made by a Norwegian film company in 1915 with Japanese actors, which lasted an hour and three-quarters and contained…

Hahaha she actually does it. (She said she was going to mark “what she considers the finer passages” with one, two, or three stars.) She does it at the very beginning of this chapter and again at this sentence: “*** Growing with the viscuous light that was invading the sky, there came the solemn, tortured-snake voice of the sea, two miles away, falling in sharp folds upon the mirror-expanses of the beach.”

And it is only because I have in mind all those thousands of persons not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops and homes, and who are not always sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle, that I have adopted the method perfected by the late Herr Baedeker, and firmly marked what I consider the finer passages with one, two or three stars. In…

Have only read the foreword and the poem, but I think I’ll like this one glancing at the way the rest of the book is constructed, which is pretty ingenious.

It seems so dreadful to be a bachelor, to become an old man struggling to keep one’s dignity while begging for an invitation whenever one wants to spend an evening in company, having to carry one’s meal home in one’s hand, unable to expect anyone with a lazy sense of calm confidence, able only with difficulty and vexation to give a gift to someone, having to say good night at the front door, never being

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When the lawyer, in reading the agreement [about the shares in the factory] to me, came to a passage concerning my possible future wife and possible children, I saw across from me a table with two large chairs and a smaller one around it. At the thought that I should never be in a position to seat in these or any other three chairs myself, my wife, and my child, there came over me a yearning for this happiness

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I can’t say I’m enjoying it. Maybe I just don’t like the sentimentality, which for me borders on bathos. I remember Lolita being painted with a much more delicate touch. I’ll probably reread that soon to reevaluate (as well as Pale Fire). To be honest, Nabokov just doesn’t seem like an author I’ll like, which is probably why I’m only just now getting to his other books.

This afternoon the pain occasioned by my loneliness came upon me so piercingly and intensely that I became aware that the strength which I gain through this writing thus spends itself, a strength which I certainly have not intended for this purpose.

I feel restless and vicious. Yesterday, before falling asleep, I had a flickering, cool little flame up in the left side of my head. The tensions over my left eye has already settled down and made itself at home. When I think about it, it seems to me that I couldn’t hold out in the office even if they told me that in one month I’d be free. And most of the time in the office I do what I am supposed to, am

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Aside from my family relationships, I could not live by literature if only, to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character; besides, I am prevented also by my health and my character from devoting myself to what is, in the most favourable case, an uncertain life. I have therefore become an official in a social insurance agency. Now these two professions can never be reconciled

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My life here is just as if I were quite certain of a second life, in the same way, for example, I got over the pain of my unsuccessful visit to Paris with the thought that I would try to go there again very soon. With this, the sight of the sharply divided light and shadows on the pavement of the street.

I haven’t written down a great deal about myself during these days, partly because of laziness (I now sleep so much and so soundly during the day, I have greater weight while I sleep) but also partly because of the fear of betraying my self-perception. This fear is justified, for one should permit a self-perception to be established definitively in writing only when it can be done with the greatest

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