R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 115

Rereading: Christa Wolf's "City of Angels"

I called Peter Gutman. How does it happen, I asked him, that our civilization brings forth monsters? Thwarted life, he said. What else. Thwarted lives. I don’t know, I said. Maybe we’re born monsters? A storm is blowing from paradise, Peter Gutman said. It pushes the angel of history backward ahead of it. But it doesn’t turn him into a monster. But he doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head, I said. No, he doesn’t, Peter Gutman said. That’s just it: he’s blind. Blind to history, I said. Blind to horrors, if you prefer, Madame. Thank you very much, I said and hung up. I thought: Being blind to horrors would be a good thing, who could live keeping all the horrors in mind. There has to be something like an expelling, extruding, exorcising of horror, I thought. I remembered how you couldn’t stop picturing your cleaning woman’s young son who had gotten stuck under a raft while swimming in the Warta and drowned, and how his mother had had to watch when they pulled the dead boy out of the water, and you wondered how she could live with that, and I remembered that you, as a child, wondered how you were supposed to endure hearing about the suffering constantly inflicted on other people, and the fear of being hurt yourself, for your whole long life long, but you didn’t then know, and would not have believed, that people, without realizing it or wanting it, develop protective techniques against self-destructive sympathy.

Recent Pics: From Easter on

I've been lazy. Busy. But I have snapped a few pics.

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Frisch's "Montauk"

Finished with Frisch (for now). Moving on to another favorite: Buchner's Lenz. I took just a few "clips." I always love Montauk.

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Lynn will not get to know what his vice is. There will not be time for that. It needs a marriage, a long one, to reveal it . . . I did not turn her into a maidservant (I occasionally washed the dishes, carried out the trash cans, did the shopping, etc.) and I have never struck the woman I love. Her complaint is a different one, and it is deserved. It took me a year to see it. At first I thought her verdict grotesque: it was that in ten years I had done nothing to help her develop her potentialities. I lavished every attention on her: the easiest way of treating a woman, and the worst. I can see that. Her reproach strikes home, but not in the way she meant it. Obviously, I have been acting from the very start as if I were God Almighty, or at least Adam, from whose rib Woman was made: COME, FOLLOW, AND I WILL LEAD! This woman is not ungrateful, but desperate. What I had imagined to be our years of happiness suddenly seem like lost years. My vice: MALE CHAUVINISM. What else but my attitude, maintained day after day from the very beginning, could have made a sensible woman believe that the development of her potentialities was a matter for her husband—for men at all? 

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They know too little and at the same time too much about each other just to chat superficially. He does not even know yet in what area Lynn is vulnerable and what would lead to their first quarrel. Lynn does not seem in fact to be thinking about it at all. Once in a while does no harm. You need a marriage, a long one, to become a monster. 

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THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN IN GOOD FAITH, READER 

and what does it keep concealed? And why?

 

 

Recent Pics from around Long Beach/Belmont Shore

Terminal Island: Japanese Fishing Village

We had a little time so I took the exit and followed the signs. Have seen the big signs off the freeway forever. A long and somewhat ugly trip. Uglier still: the loss of that cultural gem. I was somewhat disappointed in what's left.

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Wayfarers Chapel (Palos Verdes)

Beautiful day. Felt like we were in Hawaii: driving over land-in-motion. Didn't know about the Swedenborg connection.

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Frisch's "Montauk": Clips

Lynn will not get to know what his vice is. There will not be time for that. It needs a marriage, a long one, to reveal it . . . I did not turn her into a maidservant (I occasionally washed the dishes, carried out the trash cans, did the shopping, etc.) and I have never struck the woman I love. Her complaint is a different one, and it is deserved. It took me a year to see it. At first I thought her verdict grotesque: it was that in ten years I had done nothing to help her develop her potentialities. I lavished every attention on her: the easiest way of treating a woman, and the worst. I can see that. Her reproach strikes home, but not in the way she meant it. Obviously, I have been acting from the very start as if I were God Almighty, or at least Adam, from whose rib Woman was made: COME, FOLLOW, AND I WILL LEAD! This woman is not ungrateful, but desperate. What I had imagined to be our years of happiness suddenly seem like lost years. My vice: MALE CHAUVINISM. What else but my attitude, maintained day after day from the very beginning, could have made a sensible woman believe that the development of her potentialities was a matter for her husband—for men at all?

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He begins to talk about Mykonos, the Greek island, with its white houses and white windmills. About the little motorboat that took us to Delos and how it bounced on the waves, how the water came splashing in, and so on. All that he tells. But whom was it taking to Delos? Not a word about a woman who now lives virtually alone. Not a word about six years without quarrels, without jealousy, without attrition; they had never lived together. Mykonos—no, Lynn will not get there this summer . . . Then for a while he talks about Rome, the city, and what he saw and heard in Rome over five years. Lynn feels that Rome must be beautiful. He does not talk about the most terrible of all ways of dying. 

 

A Frisch Spring: Rereading Important-to-me Texts

Have lost track of how many times I've read Frisch's Man in the Holocene, but as with all my faves I find something new every time. Liked it so much I've continued on with another Frisch: Montauk. What's below are two "clips" I couldn't resist from Holocene. I have been to Frisch's Berzona, so I could feel it all the more.

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Later in the day there is more thunder; and shortly afterward, hail. The white stones, some of them the size of hazelnuts, dance on the granite table; in a few minutes the lawn is a white sheet, all Geiser can do is stand at the window and watch the vine being torn to shreds, the roses, too— There is nothing to do but read. (Novels are no use at all on days like these, they deal with people and their relationships, with themselves and others, fathers and mothers and daughters or sons, lovers, etc., with individual souls, usually unhappy ones, with society, etc., as if the place for these things were assured, the earth for all time earth, the sea level fixed for all time.)

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Now and again Geiser finds himself wondering what he really wants to know, what he hopes to gain from all this knowledge.

 

 

From Mikhail Shishkin's "Calligraphy"

Probably posted something to this effect on the first reading: Perhaps the best story in the collection is the true story of Fritz & Lydia, though I also enjoy the Nabokov story and the story about his father very much.

On to another reread: Frisch's Man in the Holocene.

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The chance to be rid of one’s ego, to give it up, to meld into a great communal endeavor, gave meaning to her existence. She thought she had found what she was striving for all these years. “My family is my comrades. No matter where I am, I’m part of one great family—the Party. Most likely in this sense of belonging, of kinship, I’ve finally discovered what I was looking for all my life.” As had Fritz, she compared this experience to a religious ecstasy. “Yes, indeed we truly resemble first century Christians—the same firm faith in the approaching, joyous salvation of the world, the same readiness to sacrifice, the same denial of the ego, of the philistine, of material things, of children, of everything that detracts from the grand idea. The difference being that religion is a lie and revolution, the truth!”

Mikhail Shishkin's "Calligraphy"

Rereading "selectively."

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I was amazed at how lovingly Alina looked at her husband. You can’t fake eyes like that. The riddle of Eva Braun. How can women sincerely love criminals, crooks, and ruffians? Will anybody ever be able to explain this?