rainydae’s Reviews > Intermezzo > Status Update

spoiler?
//
“Crossing over now towards the Abbey, brown brickwork handful of rain he thinks he feels and turns up his collar. Picture them all there together. To imagine also is life: the life that is only imagined. Clatter of saucepans, steam from the kettle. Even to think about it is to live. Hard cold wind blowing in from the sea, blowing his coat back, raising white hackles on the river. Nothing is fixed.”

“I wouldn’t want to be a woman, he said. Who would? No offence, but the level of disrespect, I couldn’t take it... Is that the sum total of your gender identity, she said.”

“Is it shame he feels, that hot blood pounding in his ears, or only embarrassment: the minor trifling embarrassment of an awkward situation or the true shame of a moral wrong”

“The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, says Wittgenstein, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent… Here saying ‘There is no third possibility’ or ‘But there can’t be a third possibility!’ – expresses only our inability to turn our eyes away from this picture”

“Or rather: to be mistaken what they are. And how is that possible… Because the name you give to a presumed relation between a man and woman may be both correct and incorrect at once. Each name including within itself a complex of assumptions.”

power//“he feels ashamed. What for, in this case? Mostly he thinks for provoking a physical confrontation with someone stronger and more violent than himself. For having in the end to rely on his adversary’s conscience and self-control in order to escape more serious injury, for having implicitly to petition his opponent for mercy which was granted, making him almost kind of queasily grateful to Peter”

it’s interesting how peter going to his mom rn i
lowkey a betrayal / selfish hypocrisy but not a conscious one ,, a move to save himself that he’s driven himself to, although ostensibly out of care for ivan (from the issues that he himself created), yet maybe further unbalancing the situation (against ivan)

the mc is so clearly peter,, margaret povs lowkey kinda random but ig it serves as a second counterpoint to peter? (ivan being the first, ironically? the meta?) but ya a bit of a trek to get thru bits of the book that don’t involve peter imo

“Her impression of the day they have spent together seems dimly to envelop her, succession of images, slender black dog racing across a green garden, taste of sea salt on her lips, glittering warmth of the hotel dining room. Idea of God as an aesthetic principle, you have nothing to feel guilty for.“

so obsessed w how this dinner scene btw ivan n peter is written

“Over the rocks at the end of the beach, saltwater crashes with a hissing fracturing sound, and sea spray rises glittering against the grey sky, droplets suspended trembling in the air before they fall.”