(no subject)
music: section 16/one man show {the polyphonic spree}
section 17/suitcase calling {the polyphonic spree}
my surgery was okay, i didn't freak out much although it was a strange process being put under. i'm taking medication now for anti-swelling and anti-pain, and i am supposed to start my antibiotics but the pills are huge and they scare me. but my pain is tolerable, i'm only swelling a lot on one side and just barely starting to bruise; i napped all afternoon and am feeling less groggy and light-headed. i think i'll be okay. thank you all for your kind thoughts.
quotations from alberto manguel's a reading diary, which, at the conclusion of my second read through, i have decided i should like to be reading incessantly - when i finish it, i turn back to the beginning and start all over again. manguel expresses everything i love about reading and writing in the most beautiful ways. here are the passages i've marked so far (and i usually don't write in books, but manguel mentions several times his own habit of note-taking in book margins, so i don't feel bad doing so in his book). my citations are not MLA-accurate but i could not care less.
Reading is a conversation. Lunatics engage in imaginary dialogues that they hear echoing somewhere in their minds; readers engage in a similar dialogue provoked silently by the words on a page. (foreward)
I'm in my library, surrounded by empty shelves and growing columns of books. It occurs to me that I can trace all my memories through these piling-up volumes. Then suddenly everything seems redunant, all this accumulation of printed paper. (16)
For years, for lack of space, I kept most of my books in storage. I used to think I could hear them call out to me at night. (17)
I will sleep one night in the library to make the space truly mine. C. says that this is equivalent to a dog peeing in the corners. (20)
When we are young, stories never seem to conclude on the book's last page. (24)
Wells attempted, in later life, to give a less fanciful, more serious shape to his ideas. For me, however, his attempt didn't pay off; it's the young scribbler I remember, the author ot the "scientific romances" of whom Jules Verne said indignantly, "But this man makes things up!" ... It is almost as if the older man, no longer able to imagine, had set out to make books from solid facts, in an effort to recapture what the younger man, inexperienced and untrained, had effortlessly conjured up in intuitions and adventurous visions. (34)
♥ A second pair of mourning doves have taken up residence on the roof of the pigeon tower. They shimmer in the heat.
♥ Summer in the garden carries implicitly all the year's changes: the winter branches before they sprouted spring leaves, the place where the fruit fell in the fall, the sequence of flowers. The regular coming and going of the seasons, the aging and death of friends, the crumbling of the walls of our house and the gnawing loss of my memory are a given, but they are also the confirmation (and the proof) of a constancy in things. Time is circular, these events say: after someone dies, I talk to someone else who remembers him, or wants to know something about him; we build up the garden wall with the stones that fell from the barn; what I no longer recall is there, somewhere, on one of the carefully numbered pages of one of my books. And I, of course, will disappear; the new wall, too, will fall away; the books will be scattered. But that of which we all form a part, a part however small, will stay on, fixed under the stars. And, as in the eye of a sculptor chiseling away at a stone, the whole will be all the more beautiful for our absence. (41-42)
A friend sends me a clipping from an English newspaper, with the heading "Housewife Kills 100 Magipies 'to Save Songbirds.'" To protect the birds she liked, the woman would trap magpies and then smash their heads against her garden wall. (42)
The Lama believes that every obstacle in his way will be removed; Kim, that he himself is capable of either removing it or going around it. (43) on Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim.
Half an hour later, I pick up Kim where I left off reading yesterday and find these words spoken by the Lama: "Thou has loosed an Act upon the world, and as a stone thrown in a pool so spread the consequences thou canst not tell how far." (49)
What a beautiful language, one that confuses waiting with hope! (49) on Spanish.
Chateaubriand on journal-keeping and the need to write down one's impressions immediately: "Our existence is so fleeting that if we don't record the events of the morning in the evening, the work will weigh us down and we will no longer have the time to bring it up to date. This doesn't prevent us from wasting our years, from throwing to the wind those hours that are for us the seeds of eternity." (64)
section 17/suitcase calling {the polyphonic spree}
my surgery was okay, i didn't freak out much although it was a strange process being put under. i'm taking medication now for anti-swelling and anti-pain, and i am supposed to start my antibiotics but the pills are huge and they scare me. but my pain is tolerable, i'm only swelling a lot on one side and just barely starting to bruise; i napped all afternoon and am feeling less groggy and light-headed. i think i'll be okay. thank you all for your kind thoughts.
quotations from alberto manguel's a reading diary, which, at the conclusion of my second read through, i have decided i should like to be reading incessantly - when i finish it, i turn back to the beginning and start all over again. manguel expresses everything i love about reading and writing in the most beautiful ways. here are the passages i've marked so far (and i usually don't write in books, but manguel mentions several times his own habit of note-taking in book margins, so i don't feel bad doing so in his book). my citations are not MLA-accurate but i could not care less.
Reading is a conversation. Lunatics engage in imaginary dialogues that they hear echoing somewhere in their minds; readers engage in a similar dialogue provoked silently by the words on a page. (foreward)
I'm in my library, surrounded by empty shelves and growing columns of books. It occurs to me that I can trace all my memories through these piling-up volumes. Then suddenly everything seems redunant, all this accumulation of printed paper. (16)
For years, for lack of space, I kept most of my books in storage. I used to think I could hear them call out to me at night. (17)
I will sleep one night in the library to make the space truly mine. C. says that this is equivalent to a dog peeing in the corners. (20)
When we are young, stories never seem to conclude on the book's last page. (24)
Wells attempted, in later life, to give a less fanciful, more serious shape to his ideas. For me, however, his attempt didn't pay off; it's the young scribbler I remember, the author ot the "scientific romances" of whom Jules Verne said indignantly, "But this man makes things up!" ... It is almost as if the older man, no longer able to imagine, had set out to make books from solid facts, in an effort to recapture what the younger man, inexperienced and untrained, had effortlessly conjured up in intuitions and adventurous visions. (34)
♥ A second pair of mourning doves have taken up residence on the roof of the pigeon tower. They shimmer in the heat.
♥ Summer in the garden carries implicitly all the year's changes: the winter branches before they sprouted spring leaves, the place where the fruit fell in the fall, the sequence of flowers. The regular coming and going of the seasons, the aging and death of friends, the crumbling of the walls of our house and the gnawing loss of my memory are a given, but they are also the confirmation (and the proof) of a constancy in things. Time is circular, these events say: after someone dies, I talk to someone else who remembers him, or wants to know something about him; we build up the garden wall with the stones that fell from the barn; what I no longer recall is there, somewhere, on one of the carefully numbered pages of one of my books. And I, of course, will disappear; the new wall, too, will fall away; the books will be scattered. But that of which we all form a part, a part however small, will stay on, fixed under the stars. And, as in the eye of a sculptor chiseling away at a stone, the whole will be all the more beautiful for our absence. (41-42)
A friend sends me a clipping from an English newspaper, with the heading "Housewife Kills 100 Magipies 'to Save Songbirds.'" To protect the birds she liked, the woman would trap magpies and then smash their heads against her garden wall. (42)
The Lama believes that every obstacle in his way will be removed; Kim, that he himself is capable of either removing it or going around it. (43) on Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim.
Half an hour later, I pick up Kim where I left off reading yesterday and find these words spoken by the Lama: "Thou has loosed an Act upon the world, and as a stone thrown in a pool so spread the consequences thou canst not tell how far." (49)
What a beautiful language, one that confuses waiting with hope! (49) on Spanish.
Chateaubriand on journal-keeping and the need to write down one's impressions immediately: "Our existence is so fleeting that if we don't record the events of the morning in the evening, the work will weigh us down and we will no longer have the time to bring it up to date. This doesn't prevent us from wasting our years, from throwing to the wind those hours that are for us the seeds of eternity." (64)