Eric Maas’s Reviews > The Rings of Saturn > Status Update

…finally the killing, accomplished in this case not by putting the cocoons out of the sun or in a hot oven, as was often the practice in the past, but by suspending them over a boiling cauldron. The cocoons, spread out on shallow baskets, have to be kept in the rising staan for upwards of three hours, and when the batch is done, it is the next one’s turn, and so on until the killing business is completed.

…a great number of people spent their lives with their wretched bodies strapped to looms made of wooden frames and rails, hung with weights, and reminiscent of instruments of torture or cages. It was a peculiar symbiosis which […] makes more apparent than any later form of factory work that we are able to maintain ourselves on this earth only by being harnessed to the machines we invented (p. 283)

9. The Temple of Jerusalem – Charlotte Ives and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand – Memoirs from beyond the grave – In Ditchingham churchyard – Ditchingham Parm – The hurricane of 16th October, 1987

There was no glare from streetlights or houses to dull the sky. But the stars had come out, in a display so resplendent as I had seen only over the Alps when I was a child, or over the desert in my dreams. […] Unchanged and, it seemed to me, more magnificent than ever before, they revolved above me. (p. 267)

I have become almost invisible, to some extent like a dead man. Perhaps that is why it appears to me that this world which I have very nearly left behind is shrouded in some peculiar mystery. (p. 255)

Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? (p. 255)

Is it not wrong to squander one’s chance of happiness in order to indulge a talent? Will what I have written survive beyond the grave? Will there be anyone able to comprehend it in a world the very foundations of which are changed? — The Vicomte wrote these words in 1822. (p. 253)

Is it not wrong to squander one’s chance of happiness in order to indulge a talent? Will what I have written survive beyond the grave? Will there be anyone able to comprehend it in a world the very foundations of which are changed? — The Chicken wrote these words in 1822. (p. 253)

8 … The entrepreneurial spirit and the cult of the pheasant – Through the desert – Secret weapons of destruction – In another country

8. A conversation about sugar – Boulge Park – The FitzGeralds – The Bredford nursery – Edward FitzGerald’s literary ventures – A Magic Shadow-Show – Loss of a friend – Year’s end – Last journey, summer landscape, tears of happiness – A game of dominoes – An Irish memory – On the history of the civil war – Arson, impoverishment and decline – Catherine of Siena –…