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A key phrase from Don Quixote:
"I know who I am," replied Don Quixote, "and I know, too, that I am quite capable of being not only the characters I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France and all the Nine Worthies as well, for my exploits are far greater than all the deeds they have done, all together and each by himself."
I started reading Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. My favorite part has been Hans Castorp's ascent. Mann relates the seperation Castorp feels from his old life during the climb.
He says, "Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly".
It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.
THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL NIGHT
Five hours: New York jet lag and she wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.
She knows, now absolutely…that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in one some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here…Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind. That must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
She seats herself in his high-backed workstation chair and clicks the transparent mouse. Stutter of infrared on the pale wood of the long trestle table. The browser comes up. She types Fetish:Footage:Forum, which Damien, determined to avoid contamination, will never bookmark.
The front page opens, familiar as a friend's living room. A frame-grab from #48 serves as backdrop, dim and almost monochrome, no characters in view. This is one of the sequences that generate comparisons with Tarkovsky. The cult of the footage is rife with subcults, claiming every possible influence. Truffaut, Peckinpah . . . The Peckinpah people, among the least likely, are still waiting for the guns to be drawn.
She enters the forum itself now, automatically scanning titles of the posts and names of posters in the newer threads, looking for friends, enemies, news. One thing is clear, though; no new footage has surfaced. Nothing since that beach pan, and she does not subscribe to the theory that it is Cannes in winter.
She also sees that her friend Parkaboy is back in Chicago, home from an Amtrak vacation, California, but when she opens his post she sees that he's only saying hello, literally.
She clicks Respond, declares herself CayceP.
Hi Parkaboy. nt
When she returns to the forum page, her post is there.
It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.
The Cube sighs softly and makes subliminal sounds with its drive, like a vintage sports car downshifting on a distant freeway. She tries a sip of tea substitute, but it's still too hot. A gray and indeterminate light is starting to suffuse the room in which she sits, revealing such Damieniana as has survived the recent remake.
"But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
Brave New World - A. Huxley
Well apart from Huxley [who was my major solace at boarding school along with Jean Paul Satre] try Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, you'll get all of the above and be begging for more. Know what I mean? Can't blame you for not reading my post by Wm. Gibson. Had to be done. Bit on the long side. Pls read this next little bit it is so true of how we now live:Quote:
Originally Posted by Moira
It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.
Jet Lag: her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here…Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind. That must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.. If this catches you, have a read of my previous [just skim, know lengthy] thread, I think it sums up much of what we do. And the next generation will read it as Jane Ayre...:)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Haven
Thank you Haven.
I googled a little bit and yes it does sound interesting.
:thumbs_up
"It is better to be hurt by the truth than comforted by a lie" The Kite Runner
The Wild Palms by William Faulkner.Quote:
...I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.
He bowed gravely, jabbed his forefinger three times at the books and winked. But as he left the room he said gently, "I've allowed you to fire me, Mr Hale. Now you do one thing for me. Read the essay again and discover the true love your son holds for the missionaries. Only a mind steeped in true love can write irony. The others write satire."
~from Hawaii The essay referred to was written by a descendant of the Hawaiian missionaries who tried to "reconstruct the actual conditions under which [his] forebears struggled against the sea" in their long journey from Boston around Cape Horn and to Hawaii.
Thats right I'm finally reading The Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I really liked the engaging tone of Hawking in this book, and the wit with which he made this book a quality-read.
Quote:
...The concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. ...
"Words! Mere words!
How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could
not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!
They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things,
and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute.
Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?"
-The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I finally got around to reading
Some quotations I like from Don Quixote:
"For I would have you know, Sancho, that a mouth without molars is like a mill without a stone, and a tooth is more precious than a diamond."
Said by Don Quixote: "That is why I say that the sage I mentioned has put it into your thoughts and into your mouth to call me now The Knight of the Sad Countenance, a name which I intend to use from this day on; and to make it fit me better, I intend to have a very sad countenance painted on my shield when I have an opportunity....."
Said by Sancho: "'There's no need to waste time and money on painting a face,' said Sancho. 'Your worship has only to uncover your own and shot it to anyone who looks at you, and they'll call you The Knight of the Sad Countenance all right, without any picture or shield, and that's the truth.'"
DUKE
...
For women are as roses, whose fair flower
Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.
VIOLA
And so they are. Alas that they are so:
To die, when they to perfection grow.
Act II, Scene iv, Lines 36 - 39 => Twelfth Night – Shakespeare.
"Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!"
From A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
"The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad.