Connie’s Reviews > Birnbaum: Rabbits, Crabs Paper > Status Update

“He had pushed himself until an unfeeling hardness marked his every move. And life had seemed to have charm for him only in his capacity for self-destruction.”

“True, like any other woman, she wanted her son to succeed. Only if he really made a name for himself would the world defer to him and let him live in peace. For that reason she wanted him to get ahead. But not for herself—no, not at all did she want him to work just so that she could be proud or satisfied with that she had such a son.”

“They do not really understand, those who say that despair makes death the only choice. To die of despair requires the enormous energy of stirring, moving, deciding. But real despair only piles on burdens of weakness, leaving the victim helpless, stripped of thought, reflex, and recourse.”

"You're talking about Eastern ideas of the void found in Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu," she interrupted. "That void is completely different from the 'emptiness' or 'nothingness' advocated by Mahayana Buddhism. In Mahayana, you accept everything and come to appreciate a stark nothingness. It's free-flowing and without obstacles—a thing that draws out the full range within you. Then all life begins to radiate—marvelously and with spirit. But young people enjoy nihilism. Affirming life seems old-fashioned, but nihilism somehow sounds fresh. Rather than using one's brains to make use of life's many resources, it's much more simple and comfortable simply to choose nihilism."

“She remembered an oppressively sultry and lonely period of agony during her own girlhood. (One of her childhood poems read, "I came to the mountain twenty days ago, but there is not one tree warm enough to console me.")”

“When clouds cross your path, won’t you ask the clouds about me?
And if you go where the snow fall, ask the snow as well.
Since you have gone, darkness has filled my heart,
Black is the night snow others call white.”