19 May 2009
Commitment to Reading
)Published on May 19th, 2009 @ 01:41:13 pm, using 4349 words, 1026 views
Essays in Love
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Woody Allen (Complete Prose)
Mrs. Dalloway
The Catcher in the Rye (Reread)
Persuasion
In Cold Blood
Committing to Reading
Committed to Reading
Commitment to Reading
Many thanks to Robbie and her ‘flabbergastingly’ bad influence ;)
—— ∫ ——
What arguments are about is never as important as the discomfort for which they are an excuse.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
There seemed to be no way to transport love in the word L-O-V-E without at the same time throwing the most banal associations into the basket. The word was too rich in foreign history: everything from the Troubadours to Casablanca had cashed in on the letters. Was it not my duty to be the author of my own feelings?
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival: we are as sceptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be sceptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table, it is hell to doubt the legitimacy of love.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
We could risk intervals of silence, we were no longer paranoid talkers, unwilling to let the conversation drop lest tranquility seem unfaithful. We grew assured of ourselves in the other’s mind, rendering perpetual seduction (stemming from a fear of the opposite) obsolete.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
We even started to acquire a story. Love seems indispensably connected to stories. ‘One day, a boy met a girl’ is enough for an audience to start to want to know what happened next.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
What is an experience? Something that breaks a polite routine and for a brief period allows us to witness things with the heightened sensitivity afforded to us by novelty, danger, or beauty - and it’s on the basis of shared experiences that intimacy is given an opportunity to grow.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
… she leaned over, gave me a kiss, and whispered, ‘You’re wearing your lost orphan boy look again.’ No one had ever ascribed such an expression to me before, though when Chole mentioned it, it at once accorded with and alleviated the confused sadness I happened to be feeling at the time. I felt an intense (and perhaps disproportionate) love for her on account of that remark, because of her awareness of what I had been feeling but had been unable to formulate myself, for her willingness to enter my world and objectify it for me - a gratefulness for reminding the orphan that he is an orphan, and hence returning him home.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
What does it mean that man is a ’social animal’? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that molluscs and earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren’t others around to show us what we’re like. ‘A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,’ wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to our words and actions. Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbours. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well, sometimes better, than we know ourselves.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
Without love, we lose the ability to possess a proper identity, within love, there is a constant confimation of our selves. It is no wonder that the concept of a God who can see us has been central to many religions: to be seen is to be assured that we exist, all the better if one is dealing with a God (or partner) who loves us. Surrounded by people who precisely do not remember who we are, people to whom we often relate our stories and yet who will repeatedly forget how many times we have been married, how many children we have, and whether our name is Brad or Bill, Catrina or Catherine (and we forget much the same about them), is it not comforting to be able to find refuge from the dangers of invisibility in the arms of someone who has our identity firmly in mind?
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
The unknown carries with it a mirror of all our deepest, most inexpressible wishes. The unknown is the fatal proposition that a face seen across the room will always hold out to the known. I may have loved Chloe but because I knew Chloe, I did not long for her. Longing cannot indefinitely direct itself at those we know, for their qualities are charted and therefore lack the mystery longing demands. A face seen for a few moments or hours only then to disappear for ever is the necessary catalyst for dreams that cannot be formulated, a desire that seems as indefinable as it is unquenchable.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
We tend to remain attached to a fixed view of emotions, as thought a line existed between loving and not lovingthat could only be crossed twice, at the beginning and end of a relationship, rather than commuted across from minute to miute. But in reality, in only a day, I might go around every available emotional dish on my inner Chinese platter.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
We might define maturity as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong and should be restricted to oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
I bowed to the tremendous authority of what already exists.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
Why did we live this way? Perhaps because to enjoy ourselves in the present would have meant engaging ourselves in an imperfect or dangerously ephemeral reality, rather than hiding behind a comfortable belief in an afterlife. Living in the future perfect tense involved holding up an ideal life to contrast with the present, one that would save us from the need to commit ourselves to our situation. It was a pattern akin to that found in certain religious, in which life on earth is only a prelude to an ever-lasting and far more pleasant heavenly existence. Our attitude towards holidays, parties, work, and perhaps love had something immortal to it, as though we would be on the earth for long enough not to have to stoop so low as to thinkthese occasions finite in number - and hence be forced to draw proper value from them.
(Essays in Love - Alain de Botton)
—— ∫ ——
At any rate she no longer rang my bell. I missed that; and as the days merged I began to feel toward her certain far-fethched resentments, as if I were being neglected by my closest friend. A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet.
(Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Truman Capote)
—— ∫ ——
Earth and air could not be more opposite than Mildred and Holly, yet in my head they acquired a Siamese twinship, and the thread of thought that had sewn them together ran like this: the average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul - desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they’d been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic. I imagined them in a restaurant of the future, Mildred still studying the menu for its nutritional values, Holly still glutunous for everything on it. It would never be dfferent. They would walk through life and out of it with the same determined step that took small notice of those cliffs at the left.
(Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Truman Capote)
—— ∫ ——
‘Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.’
(Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Truman Capote)
—— ∫ ——
Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of eah other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.
(Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Truman Capote)
—— ∫ ——
…but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? - some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morning - indeed they did. But Peter - however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink - Peter never saw a thing of all that. He would put on spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It was the state of the world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraülein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew…
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
…often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing - nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
…it being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in year out she wore that coat;she perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from school during the War - poor embittered unfortunate creature! For it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered into itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed there were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of content were nothing but self love! this hatred!
(…)
And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let flow over her and sourmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when - oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
…the dwindling of life; how year by year she share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with pearl.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
It was an extraordinary beauty of the kind she most admired, dark, large-eyed, with that quality which, since she hadn’t got it herself, she always envied - a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything; a quality much commoner in foreigners than in English women.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing ro the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there - the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green fold together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying ‘that is all’ more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking far away barking and barking.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
[Peter] was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
‘Do you remember the lake?’ she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said ‘lake.’ For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, ‘This is what I have made of it!’ And what had she made of it? What, indeed? (…)
She looked at Peter Walsh; her look, passing through all that time and that emotion, reached him doubtfully; settled on him tearfully; and she rose and fluttered away, as a bird touches a branch and rises and flutters away. Quite simply she wiped her eyes.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
…down his mind went as flat as a marsh, and three great emotions bowled over him; understand; a vast philanthropy; and finally, as if the result of the others, an irrepressible, exquisite delight; as if inside his brain by another hand strings were pulled, shutters moved, and he, having nothing to do with it, yet stood at the opening of endless avenues, down which if he chose he might wander. He had not felt so young for years.
He had escaped! was utterly free - as happens in the downfall of habit when the mind, like an unguarded flame, bows and bends and seems about to blow from its holding. I haven’t felt so young for years!
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms his fun, for it was half made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought - making oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share - it smashed to atoms.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
There was Regent’s Park. Yes. As a child he had walked in Regent’s Park - odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me - the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places…
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
Her emotions were all on the surface. Beneath, she was very shrewd - a far better judge of character than Sally, for instance, and with it all, purely feminine; with the extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be. She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in his hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained - at last! - the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence - the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
(Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)
—— ∫ ——
“Frankly, I don’t know what the hell to say to you, Holden.”
“I know. I’m very hard to talk to. I realize that.”
“I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don’t honestly know what kind… Are you listening to me?”
“Yes.”
You could tell he was trying to concentrate and all.
“It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’ Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don’t know. But do you know what I’m driving at, at all?”
(…)
“All right. Listen to me a minute now… I may not word this as memorably as I’d like to, but I’ll write you a letter about it in a day or two. Then you can get it all straight. But listen now, anyway.” He started concentrating again. Then he said, “This fall I think you’re riding for - it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started. You follow me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
(…)
“Once you get past all the Mr. Vinsons, you’re going to start getting closer and closer - that is, if you want to, and if you look for it and wait for it - to the kind of information that will be very, very dear to your heart. Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.” (…) “I’m not trying to tell you,” he said, “that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It’s not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they’re brilliant and creative to begin with - which unfortunately, is rarely the case - tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And - most important - nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker.
(…)
“Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it’ll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”
(The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger)
—— ∫ ——
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Reading, list, love, Woody Allen, prose, Capote, Salinger, Woolf, Austen
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