July 16, 2009
A Perfectly Adjusted Organism
“Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside the cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, ‘I do enjoy myself’ or ‘I am horrified’ we are insincere. ‘As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror’– it’s no more than that, really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.”– from E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India
June 29, 2009
They had the bedside lamps on
“Helen can bring herself to the point of weeping just thinking about Cal’s yellow rain jacket that came to his thighs and the rubber boots he wore back then and the Norwegian sweater with the elbows out of it and how he rolled his own cigarettes for a time, which was unheard of (he had other pretensions: he made his own yogurt and tofu, grew pot, experimented with tie-dye), and how he wanted a house around the bay for summers, and how the children came by accident, every single one of them. Cal was a reader, of course; he read everything he got his hands on. They both read. Helen had a book in her overnight bag and so did Cal, and after they’d had sex and showered and looked through the TV channels and eaten and drunk some more beer, they each got their books, and they had the bedside lamps on. They fell asleep like that. Cal with a book over his chest.”– Lisa Moore, February
June 19, 2009
Ingesting words with his eyes
“Anthony could talk and read at the same time. But his eyes trumped his ears. He usually remembered what he’d read while talking, but he never remembered conversations he’d had while reading. He was like a sleepwalker who grocery-shopped and paid bills in his sleep and forgot it all the next morning. Most of our conversations were now conducted with a book between us– his book, of course. When I read, I shushed him ferociously, for all the good it did me; he had never accepted the fact that other people didn’t possess his unique facility for ingesting words with his eyes while spewing them from his mouth.” –from Trouble by Kate Christensen
May 18, 2009
A country where you don't know the language
“The first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don’t know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it’s just the horizon– and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it’s suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you’ve had the right shots.”– Emily Perkins, Novel About My Wife
May 14, 2009
Reliving my own evolution
“I begin to relive at high speed my own evolution towards language, towards stories. Reading books to my daughter revives my appetite for expression. Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn. I begin to find them everywhere, in pages that I thought familiar; prophecies of what was to come, pictures of the very place in which I now stand, and yet which I look on with no spark of recognition. I wonder how I could have read so much and learned so little. I have stared at these words like the pots and pans, the hoarded gold of a precious civilization, immured in museum glass. Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case. I read as if I were reading letters from the dead, letters addressed to me but long unopened; as if by reading I were bringing back the vanished past, living it again as I would like to live every day of my life again, perfectly, without misunderstanding.” –Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother
May 9, 2009
Thatcher knew the type
“Thatcher knew the type. They broke spines, they dog-eared pages, they scribbled obscene comments in the margins and squashed bugs between the covers, they branded the text with coffee rings, flicked ashes in the binding, wiped freshly excavated ear wax on the end papers, used rusty bobby pins and strips of bacon for bookmarks. Small potatoes, he realized, petty vandalism, but not unconnected to great offences. Thatcher had a panoramic vision when it came to crime, a comprehensive view that took in the roots of evil as well as the fruit. All thanks to the firm, guiding hand of his mother, a long-suffering librarian who filled him in like the empty pages of a notepad, sparing no detail. A child who forgets to return a library book, she had warned, may well grow up to be the kind of person who “forgets” to take a knife out of someone’s back…” –Terry Griggs, “Tag” from Quickening
April 13, 2009
Then let us drink a cup of tea
“The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.” –Muriel Barbery, trans. Alison Anderson, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
April 7, 2009
Worry is the work
“In the years to follow, my midwifery practice taught me that for some women, worry is the work of pregnancy. In fact, an over-confident first time mom who thinks she has it all figured out worries me. I worry she will not be truly prepared for what awaits her.”– Pam England, Birthing from Within
March 11, 2009
A cynical deception
“It sometimes seemed to Molly that the library was a place of silent discord and anarchy, its superficial tranquility concealing a babel of assertion and dispute. Fiction is one strident lie– or rather, many competing lies; history is a long narrative of argument and reassessment; travel shouts of self-promotion; biography is just pushing a product. As for autobiography… And all this is just fine. That is the function of books: they offer a point of view, they offer many conflicting points of view, they provoke thought, they provoke irritation and admiration and speculation. They take you out of yourself and put you down somewhere else from whence you never entirely return. If the library were to speak, Molly felt, if it were to speak with a thousand tongues, there would be a deep collective growl coming from the core collection up on the high shelves, where the voices of the nineteenth century would be setting precedents, the bleats and cries of a new opinion, new fashion, new style. The surface repose of a library is a cynical deception.” –Penelope Lively, Consequences
February 26, 2009
No contradiction
“It’s my audacious hope that a man born and raised between opposing dogmas, between cultures, between voices, could not help but be aware of the extreme contingency of culture. I further audaciously hope that such a man will not mistake the happy accident of his own cultural sensibilities for a set of natural laws, suitable for general application. I even hope that he will find himself in agreement with George Bernard Shaw when he declared, “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.” But that may be an audacious hope too far. We’ll see if Obama’s lifelong vocal flexibility will enable him to say proudly with one voice “I love my country” while saying with another voice “It is a country, like other countries.” I hope so. He seems just the man to demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation but rather a proper and decent human harmony.”– Zadie Smith, “Speaking in Tongues”
