that reading thing I do...
Ian McEwan's Amsterdam
As always with McEwan, there are so many passages to choose from. I didn't enjoy Amsterdam as much as his other works, but as always - as good turn of phrase makes so much worthwhile. My picks below are, as usual, ones that speak most loudly to my experiential self, my soul, politics, etc.:
...he felt, despite his optimism, the unease of outdoor solitude wrap itself around him. He drifted helplessly into a daydream, an elaborate story about someone hiding behind a rock, waiting to kill him. Now and then he glanced over his shoulder. He knew this feeling well because he often hiked alone. There was always a reluctance to overcome. It was an act of will, a tussle with instinct, to keep walking away from the nearest people, from shelter, warmth, and help. ...His shrinking spirit and all his basic inclinations told him that it was foolish and unnecessary to keep on, that he was making a mistake. page 83
When at last he directed his attention out of the window, a familiar misanthropy had settled on him and he saw in the built landscape sliding by nothing but ugliness and pointless activity. ...no it appeared that this was what it really was - square miles of meager modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic. ... Nobody had planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in in. ... Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung farther away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty, or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened into a concreted sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning. page 68-69
As always with McEwan, there are so many passages to choose from. I didn't enjoy Amsterdam as much as his other works, but as always - as good turn of phrase makes so much worthwhile. My picks below are, as usual, ones that speak most loudly to my experiential self, my soul, politics, etc.:
...he felt, despite his optimism, the unease of outdoor solitude wrap itself around him. He drifted helplessly into a daydream, an elaborate story about someone hiding behind a rock, waiting to kill him. Now and then he glanced over his shoulder. He knew this feeling well because he often hiked alone. There was always a reluctance to overcome. It was an act of will, a tussle with instinct, to keep walking away from the nearest people, from shelter, warmth, and help. ...His shrinking spirit and all his basic inclinations told him that it was foolish and unnecessary to keep on, that he was making a mistake. page 83
When at last he directed his attention out of the window, a familiar misanthropy had settled on him and he saw in the built landscape sliding by nothing but ugliness and pointless activity. ...no it appeared that this was what it really was - square miles of meager modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic. ... Nobody had planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in in. ... Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung farther away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty, or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened into a concreted sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning. page 68-69