More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 22 - October 26, 2019
Without a future, the mind turned back in on itself. That’s not dementia. One might even say it’s the only rational response to the inevitable.
Only the educated stop to look for words—having enough to occasionally misplace them.
Panic is not the same as being scared. Everyone gets scared. It is a survival mechanism. It tells you that something is wrong and requires your attention.
How tolerant should we be of intolerance?
I think he is consumed by guilt for surviving.
My son’s name was Saul. He was named for the first king of Israel.
God may have breathed life into us. But it was only when we used it to correct God that we became men. Became, however briefly, what we can be. Took our place in the universe. Became the children of the night.
In the Land of the Free, we sit where we like. We sit where we can.
The balance spring is the heart of the watch.
Wrath does not invent itself; it is the product of the ways of others. We all must brace for the impact of what we put into this life.
Insanity is merely the absence of sanity.
Sanity is the thick soup of distraction we immerse ourselves in to keep from remembering that we’re gonna bite it.
Do the unimaginable in plain view. People assume it has to be something else.”
There are a few novels by authors she has not heard of: Philip Roth, James Salter, Mark Helprin, Richard Ford.
Semper fidelis. Always faithful.
“You ask for two kinds of forgiveness,” Sheldon explained. “You ask God to forgive you for your trespasses against Him. But you also ask people to forgive you for your trespasses against them. You do the second because, according to our philosophy, there is only one thing God can’t do. He can’t forgive you for what you do to other people. You need to ask forgiveness from them directly.”
“Which is why there is no forgiveness for murder,” Rhea said. “Because you can’t ask forgiveness from the dead.”
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was a song by someone named Gordon Lightfoot. It was playing incessantly on the radio in August 1976,
“George Clooney shot Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading. In a closet. I knew that guy was wrong.”
It is all clearer now than it was then. Rhea would say it is the vivid fabrication of an aging mind. More likely, though, it is the clarity that comes from aging—from the natural process of releasing the mind from imagined futures, and allowing the present and the past to take their rightful place at the center of our attention.
Convinced he is alone, he moves more quickly now. He knows that the human eye is most attuned to movement and only then registers color. We are not hunters. We are designed as prey, and our senses control us like prey.
There are sounds, usually but not exclusively spoken sounds, that announce the end of days—when knowledge is shared that all is lost and can never be recovered. The notification of a loved one’s death is such a sound.
A righteous Jewish man dies and goes to meet God. He approaches Him and says, “May I ask you a question?” God sees the puzzlement on the man’s face and takes pity on him. “Yes.” So the man asks, “Is it true that the Jews are your chosen people?” God considers the question. “Yes,” He says, “it is true.” The man nods, opens his arms, and says, “Then would you mind choosing someone else for a change?”
Facing the darkness, he announces loudly and clearly, so that no one in the house can have any doubt about what is being said: “I am General Henrik Horowitz Ibsen. And you are surrounded!”
Sheldon reaches up his hand and touches Sigrid gently on the cheek. “My son. Is he OK? Is he well?” “Your boy is fine, Mr. Horowitz. He is just fine.”
This book was written in 2008 in Geneva, Oslo, and Fornalux. The ending came to me in the moments before my son, Julian, was born that April.
The lighthouse at Palmi-do at Inchon, Korea, was built in 1903. In 2006 it was made obsolete and replaced by a modern one. But the diminutive eight-meter tower still stands in the shadow of its big brother.
Unusually, this book was first published in Norway in 2011, in Norwegian, despite its having been written in English.
In 2012, sixty-seven years after the end of World War II, the Norwegian government formally apologized to the Jewish population for its actions during the occupation.
DEREK B. MILLER is the director of The Policy Lab and a senior fellow with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. Born and raised in Boston, he has lived abroad for more than fifteen years, in Norway, Switzerland, Britain, Israel, and Hungary. He now lives in Oslo with his wife and two children.
