Noel > Recent Status Updates

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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Almost every word I write jars against the next, I hear the consonants rub leadenly against each other and the vowels sing an accompaniment like Negroes in a minstrel show. My doubts stand in a circle around every word, see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it. Of course, that wouldn’t be the greatest misfortune, only I ought to be able to invent words capable

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The Evening of the Holiday

The night is soft and bright and without wind,
and the moon hangs still above the roofs
and kitchen gardens, showing every mountain
clear in the distance. O my lady,
every lane is quiet now, and night lights
glow in the windows only here and there.
You sleep, for sleep came easily to you
in your still room. No worry troubles you,
nor can you imagine
what a wound you opened in my heart.
…

We … are held in our past and future. … Whatever advantage the future has in size, the past compensates for in weight, and at their end the two are indeed no longer distinguishable, earliest youth later becomes distinct, as the future is, and the end of the future is really already experienced in all our sighs, and thus becomes the past. So this circle along whose rim we move almost closes.

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Externally I am a man like others, … But if I lacked an upper lip here, there an ear, here a rib, there a finger, … this would still be no adequate counterpart to my inner imperfection. This imperfection is not congenital and therefore so much the more painful to bear. For like everyone, I too have my centre of gravity inside me from birth, and this not even the most foolish education could displace.

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I write this very decidedly out of despair over my body and over a future with this body.

When despair shows itself so definitely, is so tied to its object, so pent up, as in a soldier who covers a retreat and thus lets himself be torn to pieces, then it is not true despair. True despair overreaches its goal immediately and always, (at this comma it became clear that only the first sentence was correct).

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“lovers always feel that their meeting took place too late, as if the amount of time occupied by their passion was never enough or, in retrospect, never long enough (the present is untrustworthy), or perhaps they can’t bear the fact that once there was no passion between them, not even a hint of it, while the two of them were in the world, swept along by its most turbulent currents, and yet with…”

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“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 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/

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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