Connie’s Reviews > Beginning Middle End: A Novel > Status Update
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Connie
is 72% done
“I suppose all we are ever doing is transmuting and translating: mountain to rock, rock to sand, sand to glass, glass to light, light to eyes, eyes to see, see to imagine, imagine to remember.”
— 11 hours, 19 min ago
Connie
is 70% done
“Because fiction is where memory and imagination meet.
What do you even mean, Ma?
Just that imagination looks forward and memory backward, and where the two meet, that's fiction.
That's absurd.
Why?
Because, if something looks forward and another thing looks backward, they don't ever see each other.”
— 11 hours, 21 min ago
What do you even mean, Ma?
Just that imagination looks forward and memory backward, and where the two meet, that's fiction.
That's absurd.
Why?
Because, if something looks forward and another thing looks backward, they don't ever see each other.”
Connie
is 66% done
“That moment is glass: a startlingly translucent, hard, and fragile moment of transition.”
— 11 hours, 23 min ago
Connie
is 64% done
“A boyfriend I had when I was in my early twenties used to say that the difference between porn and eroticism is only the amount of light. Maybe.”
— 11 hours, 26 min ago
Connie
is 61% done
“Perhaps there is one specific sentiment, a kind of longing or nostalgia, that can warp time strangely: I think, sometimes, I miss the present more than I miss the past. And perhaps that is a form of time travel.”
— 11 hours, 29 min ago
Connie
is 56% done
“It's strange to think that what was seemingly the destruction of a place by natural forces—an earthquake, a landslide—was in fact the reason for its eventual preservation, whatever destruction and preservation mean in the arches and warps of human history. For about six centuries, the mosaics in the villa remained in the dark, covered by mud and rocks, their colors protected from the sunlight.”
— 13 hours, 20 min ago
Connie
is 54% done
“Some art historians say that an archaeological site is always a destruction site. Is that true? Do we have to destroy things in order to see them, sever things in order to know them? And what kind of knowing is that?”
— 13 hours, 22 min ago
Connie
is 48% done
“But in the introduction to the Loeb edition of Hesiod's Theogony […] I read that Chaos, the divine entity, is best translated as Chasm and not Chaos, because, in Hesiod's time, "chaos" did not connote disarray, lack of order, and all those things it means for us today. Chaos was perhaps a gap, an opening.”
— 13 hours, 24 min ago
[…]
I am not sure exactly what Pliny means, that the mountains are the memory of the world. But if they are, if mountains really are memory, and they get destroyed and quarried and hauled away, does that mean that the world loses its memory like an old person does? And if losing memory means being lost in time, what does that mean about the world? And are those memories lost forever, or are they still inside the stones that get hauled away? […] If stones are the little memories of mountains, and mountains are the whole memory of the world, and everything is quarried and hauled away and scattered, maybe the world loses its memory and its mind and becomes chaos. But if all the stones are put back to where they belong, maybe the world will remember and be itself again one day.”