Context
I found a paperback of this book in the shelf in the hogan at Black Mesa. I got really drawn into it and read after herding in the afternoons, at the kitchen table and on the bed when it’s hot and there’s not super super urgent things to do. I felt unfamiliar to the rage of the never ending road into misery but familiar to the pity of condemnation from some other voices of things you cannot change, eg how you look.
Quotes
- “Many readers remain touched but not moved” - I got this, that touch is to respond but move is to have a feeling, pushed, changed heart.
- “She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one’s major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.” - I feel like a hotel room when I talk to someone, I listen and ask, but they just talk about themselves, because they expect me to share if I wanted to or they don’t care about me. I am an interviewer, a room, a sound back. Then when I tell this bitterness to Sunshine she says sometimes she wants to know but I ask the next question too fast, maybe I could give a pause for the other person to ask or say whatever.
- “guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.” - this love with ourselves sounds great. how awesome that our body can be a sensor and a fast car.
- “the change was adjustment without improvement” — there is a difference, adjustment is change in any direction, improvement is change in direction or distance from the goal state.
- “You looked at them and wondered why the were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The mast had said, “You are ugly people.” They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. “Yes,” they had said. “You are right.” — subjectivities are often so arbitrary. you think this way, someone tells you over and over again some way, it’s all forces and memory.
systems
- “Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live” — but when it’s the place that doesn’t let the seed grow, the seed could have grown elsewhere if born there, the right is just the uncontrollable. i feel a bit unfair.
- “Jealousy we understood and thought natural… But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.” — I know i am influenced by the thought of the external assignment of beautiful, virtuous, good. who assigns? can I control my assigner to just be people who always love me?
- “Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him … His subconscious knew what his min did not guess-that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke.” — again The Thing to fear, if you hate that thing, and you can’t do anything to it, you will despair.
Related notes
- how to socialize as a human: we wish to not be controlled by The Thing or misery at the unchangeables.