Geral(dine)’s Reviews > What We Can Know > Status Update

📚 107
The Corona was more beautiful for not being known. (...) it presented to posterity the pure form, the ideal of all poetry.(...) The imagined lords it over the actual - no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. (...) Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.

📚 98
If we weren't crushed by the past, we were terrified of it. Our finest achievement was not to be at war. (...) Our seas were cleaner, with life beginning to return (...) That was not down to virtue. It was the result of civilisations collapse. Whenever humans got out of the way, the rest of the living world edged back and flourished.

💬 "rapturous swagger" :D color my vocabulary influenced heheh

📚 94
I felt younger, healthier and more attractive than I could possibly hope to be at the age of forty-four. Some rapturous form of inner swagger assured me that I was worthy of the moment.

📚 28
I know all that they knew - and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths. That they are both vivid and absent is painful. They can move me and touch me, but I cannot them. Sustained historical research is a dance with strangers I have come to love (...).

📚22 - Francis about the poem
It loves the natural world more than I do.

📚 23
They would surely love this poem. They would not understand it. But Vivien would.

💬 still don't know about this one. It's great and then it isn't. Banger sentence followed by dry scene setting clouding up my eyeballs (I understand this checks out for who I'm following here and the general research premise but twas a gift I did nawt pick this book myself. Let me moan and enjoy and complain again!)

📚 12
The issue was not a lost birthday poem read after dinner, It was what the poem by its non-existence had become: a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective anger and a focus of unhinged reverence.

finished: 1 (pages 3-10)

Page 10
"(...) Apparently, the field of speculation is 'the nature of the universe'. In which case it's also a matter for poetry. The impenetrable concepts don't need to be understood to be made to sing."

Pages 7+8 - Francis

"Francis never stirred from his chair, never did a thing. I don't think it crossed his mind that the household, the meals or even the state of his underwear might have something to do with him. He was, after all, a genius."