Moving on

22Sep13

I’m moving on to here: http://highlightsandstains.tumblr.com/

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

03Aug09

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighted down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment.

– p. 5

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with out previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

– p. 8

Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

– p. 15

Ever since man has learned to give each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. He has also learned that the soul is nothing more than the gray matter of the brain in action. The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.
But just make someone who has fallen in love to listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.

– p. 40

If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

– p. 44

Necessity knows no magic formulae – they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.

– p. 49

Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure.

– p. 89

The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they have been in life. Their monuments were meant to display how important they were. There were no fathers, brothers, sons, or grandmothers buried there, only public figures, the bearers of titles, degrees, and honors; even the postal clerk celebrated his chosen profession, his social significance – his dignity.

– p. 123

I then lost my highlighter.

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The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry

03May09

It is funny, but is strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following then. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.

-p.11

How I would like to say that I love my father so much that I could not have lived without him, but such an avowal would be proved false in time. Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp him. It is as if a huge lump of lead were lain over the soul, such deaths, and where that soul was previously weightless, now is a secret and ruinous burden at the very heart of us.

-p.19

Dear reader! Dear reader, if you are gentle and good, I wish I could clasp your hand. I wish – all manner of impossible things. Although I do not have you, I have other things. There are moments when I am pierced through by an inexplicable joy, as if, in having nothing, I have the world. As if, in reaching this room, I have found the anteroom to paradise, and soon will find it opening, and walk forward like a woman rewarded for my pains, into those green fields, and folded farms. So green the grass is burning!

-p.24

He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of like, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

-p.30

For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.
History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man’s domination of the earth.

-p.56

Well, all speaking is difficult, whether peril attends it or not. Sometimes peril to the body, sometimes a more intimate miniature, invisible peril to the soul. When to speak at all is a betrayal of something, perhaps a something not even identified, hiding inside the chambers of the body like a sacred refuge in a site of war.

-p.80

He was perhaps plamasing me, flannelling me, as my father would have said. To enter me into some subject, where he could begin. A door into whatever he needed to understand. A part of me yearned to help him. Give him welcome. But. The rats of shame bursting through the wall I have constructed with infinite care over the years and milling about in my lap, was what it felt like. That was my job to hide it then, hide those wretched rats.
Why did I feel that dark shame after all these years? Why still in me, that dark dark shame?

-p.84

Do you know the grief of it? I hope not. The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father.

-p.90

I feel so bereft I am almost inclined to admire any instance of simple strength of mind, all health of mind. I watch the images of Saddam Hussein, ‘President of Iraq’ as he still called himself, being hanged, and scoured his face for signs of suffering and pain. He looked confused but strong, almost serene. He had such contempt for his captors even as they taunted him. He did not believe maybe they had the strength to finish his term in life. To complete his story. Or he thought if he could find strength within himself, he would complete his own story with an admirable flourish. He looked so bedraggled and astray when they took him from the hidey hole months before. His jacket and shirt were always immaculate in court. Who washed them, brushed them, ironed them? What handmaiden? What does his story look like seen with the eyes of a friend, and admirer, a fellow townsperson? I envied him the evident peace of his mind as he went to his death.

-p.120

While he lived it seemed the apogee of existence was just what he was himself. But in his death he was magnificent, brave. In his death he became more democratic maybe, because death includes everything, likes everything human – can’t get enough of it. Death be not proud. Well yes, but death is mighty and dreadful.

-p.157

Unfathomable. Fathoms. I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place? Or one on top of the other like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have both become the same element, and I cannot distinguish one from the other with any ease, unless it is from close, close looking?

-p.227

It is something like the gates of St Peter, banging on the gates, asking for entrance to heaven, and in my heavy heart knowing, too many sins, too many sins. But perhaps mercy!

-p.265

But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognize that we live our lives , and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on theses paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent building on foundations of utter dust.

-p.304

Grief is about two years long, they say, it is a platitude out of manuals for grievers. But we are in mourning for our mother before even we are born.

-p.308

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Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen

30Apr09

Age is a terrible thief. Just when you’re getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back. It makes you ache and muddies your head and silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse.

-p.17

I try to brush the hairs flat with my hand and freeze at the sight of my old hand on my old head. I lean close and open my eyes very wide, trying to see beyond the sagging flesh.
It’s no good. Even when I look straight into the milky blue eyes, I can’t find myself anymore. When did I stop being me?

-p.142

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The Crimson Portrait, Jody Shields

30Apr09

“All hospitals should have glass roofs,” he declared to a startled orderly. “The patients could watch the stars when they couldn’t sleep.” To be surrounded by such regular order was surely joy, he thought.

-p.84

If the human mind believes in the usefulness of a thing, which is in itself quite useless, it can happen that the thing actually helps the body through the power of the imagination.

-p.108

Silently, he directed her to pick up happiness like loose stones on a path or seek the quiet of a cloud, a tree, a bird, reflected in all their temporary perfection in water.

-p.219

All things are always changing,
But nothing dies. The spirit comes and goes,
Is housed wherever it wills, shifts residence
From beasts to men, from men to beasts, but always
It keeps on living. As the pliant wax
Is stamped with new designs, and is no longer
What once it was, but changes form, and still
Is pliant wax, so do I teach that spirit
Is evermore the same, though passing always
To ever changing bodies.

-p.271

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My Favourite Wife, Tony Parsons

23Mar09

You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sights, at ever and ever sight.

-p.1

‘This is what you shall do,’ he said again. ‘Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despite riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to other, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men.’

-p.193

What I the problem was not trying to meet someone great by that you would meet a lot of great people? What if the problem was not finding someone worthy to love, but meeting an endless number of people who were worthy of love? What then? Was that a blueprint for a happy life? Or a recipe for disaster?

-p.219

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The Map of Love, Ahdaf Soueif

23Mar09

There is no point in saying ‘This, too, shall pass.’ For a time, we do not even want it to pass. We hold on to grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal.

-p.40

Something there is moves me to love, and I
Do know I love, but know not how, nor why.
– Alexander Brome

-p.47

How can it strike so suddenly? Without warning, without preparation? Should it not grow on you, taking its time, so that when the moment comes when you think ‘I love you’, you know – or at least imagine you know – what it is you love? How can it be that a set of shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a string of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow?

-p.48

Old people are starved of touch: no husband, no lover, no child to slip a hand into a hand, to plant sticky kisses on nose and cheek to mouth, to snuggle and fit into the curves of the body. I watched my grandmother – my mother’s mother – in her last years: her hand, the skin drawn parchmentlike over the bones, stroking, stroking, the chairs, the table, the bedspread.

-p.53

So at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow; the closer you are to the heart, the closer to the reversal. Nowhere to go but down. You reach the core and then you’re blown away.

p.82

But still the heart doth need a language
– S. T. Coleridge

-p.47

Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

-p.217

It can’t be that bad. Surely it can’t be that bad. There must be a way, only we can’t see it yet. A way of making a space for ourselves where we can make the best of ourselves – we just can’t quite see it. But things move on and by the time you’ve plotted your position the world around you has changes and you’re running – panting – to catch up. How can you think clearly when you’re running? That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of history. You leave it and come back to it and it waits for you – unchanged. You can turn back the pages, look again at the beginning. You can leaf forward and know the end. And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part.

-p.234

In the act of love there is decreed for every part a portion of pleasure: so the eyes are for the pleasures of looking and nostrils are to smell sweet perfume. The pleasure of the lips lies in kissing, and of the tongue in sipping and sucking and licking. The teeth find their pleasure in biting, and the penis in penetration. The hands love to feel and explore. The lower half of the body is for touching and caressing and the upper half is for holding and embracing – and as for the ears, their pleasure is in listening to the words and sounds of love.
– Al-Imam Jalal Al-Din Al-Sayti

-p.327

‘Hubb’ is love, ‘’ishq’ is love that entwines two people together, ‘shaghaf’ is love that nests in the chambers of the hearts, ‘hayam’ is love that wanders the earth, ‘teeh’ is love in which you lose yourself, ‘walah’ is love that carries sorrow within it, ‘sababah’ is love that exudes from your pores, ‘hawa’ is love that shares its name with ‘air’ and ‘falling’, ‘gharam’ is love that is willing to pay the price.
I have learned so much this past year, I could not list all the things I have learned.

-p.386

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Life of Pi, Yann Martel

24Feb09

When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling. My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. I look at it and I say, “You’ve got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but I don’t believe in death. Move on!” The skull snickers and moves ever closer, but that doesn’t surprise me. The reason death stick so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.

-p.6

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

-p.31

Hindus, in their capacity to love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat-wearing Muslims.

-p.54

Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important that an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

-p.70

Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and the happiness that might have been your becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing. The sight brings on an oppressive sadness that no car about to hit you or water about to drown you can match. The feeling is truly unbearable.

-p.163

I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. IT has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the grab of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tried to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reasons comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.
Fear next turns to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw beings to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear
Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.
The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as your feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like gangrene: it seeks to rot everything , even the words with which to speak of it. So you might fight hard to express it. You much fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

-p.178

Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up

-p.231

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Jazz, Toni Morrison

23Feb09

This notion of rest, it’s attractive to her, but I don’t think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn’t like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down. No fields of cowslips will rush into that opening, nor mornings free of flies and heat when the light is shy. No. Not at all. They fill their mind and hands with soup and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage. Molten. Thick and slow-moving. Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury. Or else, into a beat of time, and sideways under their breasts, slips a sorrow they don’t know where from.

-p.16

When Violet threw out the birds, it left her not only without the canaries’ company and the parrot’s confession but also minus the routine of covering their cages, a habit that had become one of those necessary things for the night. The things that help you sleep all the way through it. Back-breaking labor might do it; or liquor. Surely a body – friendly if not familiar – lying next to you. Someone whose touch is reassurance, not an affront or a nuisance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor disgust, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet. And rituals help too: door locking, tidying up, cleaning teeth, arranging hair, but they are preliminaries to the truly necessary things. Most people want to crash into sleep. Get knocked into it with a fist of fatigue to avoid a night of noisy silence, empty birdcages that don’t need wrapping in cloth, or bold unsmiling girls staring from the mantelpiece.

-p.27

Now he lies in bed remembering every detail of that October afternoon when he first met her, from start to finish, and over and over. Not just because it is tasty, but because he is trying to sear her into his mind, brand her there against future wear.

-p.28

The pain of his refusal was visual, for over her heart, curled like a shell, was the hand on which he had positioned the ring. As thought she held the broken pieces of her heart together in the crook of a frozen arm.

-p.62

The body she inhabits is unworthy. Although it is young and all she has, it is as if it had decayed on the vine at budding time.

-p.67

Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm. Mourning the split trees, hens starving on rooftops. Figuring out what can be done to save them since they cannot save themselves without me because – well, it’s my storm, isn’t it? I break lives to prove I can mend them back again. And although the pain is theirs, I share it, don’t I? Of course. Of course. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But it is another way. I am uneasy now. Feeling a bit false. What, I wonder, what would I be without a few brilliant spots of blood to ponder? Without aching words that set, then miss, the mark?

-p.219

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I Think of You, Ahdaf Soueif

23Feb09

To everything there is an order and a pattern. And the pattern and the order are good. Time, from one birthday to the next, runs gently by, overflowing with an abundance of pleasures. If there are fears and griefs, they are minor and I am always able to be comforted by the grown-ups.

-p.11

Her finger still on the mirror, it came to her that that was an apt metaphor for her relationship with him. She could see him, sense his contours and his warmth, but whenever she made a move to touch him, there would be a smooth, consistent surface. It was transparent, but it was unbreakable. At times she had felt he put it there on purpose and she had been furiously resentful. At others it had seemed that he was trapped behind it and was looking to her to set him free.

Hotel bathrooms all over the world had seen her locked in, head over the bowl, crying, or simply sitting on the tiled floor reading through the night while he slept alone, unknowing, in large double beds that mocked her.

-p.53

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