Read this while in Costa Rica. The title essay made me think a lot about tourism and thus reading it while on vacation was quite a trip (literally - hRead this while in Costa Rica. The title essay made me think a lot about tourism and thus reading it while on vacation was quite a trip (literally - haha).
I would read it again, for sure. It gave me that peculiar feeling that reading David Foster Wallace always does: that you are part of the joke, the fellow cynic looking on, flabbergasted yet highly amused at the absurdity of it all.
To show how many random/interesting thoughts it brought up, here are some things I wrote in the cover of the book while reading it:
- Lynch essay describes how I feel about IJ - absurdist but with no judgment - To read: "Stop-Time" - I should buy a camera case and a waterproof watch. - Professional smile - New theory on photography: to remember - I learned very early on that parents are only people - Email Naomi about Starbucks memory - Memory of listening to OJ Simpson trial in parking lot in Utah - Things to not forget about Linares: store without a sign, crying goat, sleeping outside, separate kitchen, radio background, grapes/raspberries, dogs, chickens, first time meeting extranjero, girl with camera, riding horse in sunset, slow hiking, out of shape ppl in denial, being cold at night, eating cold canned soup, making people try PB, 'will you marry my son?', flowers in the yard, houses made of mud, annoying when people speak English instead of slowing down Spanish, treatment of pets, road put in ten years ago, man walking house to house selling clothes, Spanish heritage, woman in Burton shoes carrying a water bucket, sitting in river eating blackberries, sitting on a rock above the river, once on a Sunday with family
There are more. Maybe the amount of idea-generating influence it had alone makes this book a must-read. ...more
It was a slog to get through, because the writing style can be somewhat dry. But, the content is pretty damn compelling. I This was a book club book.
It was a slog to get through, because the writing style can be somewhat dry. But, the content is pretty damn compelling. I think the title of this book is wrong - it isn’t really about happiness, it’s more a look at what we believe about ourselves and what is actually true about the human brain and how to think about where those two things diverge. I’ve heard the “money doesn’t actually make you happy” research recited elsewhere, but here Haidt really drives the point home.
Despite this book not being a page turner, I would still recommend it highly. The information it holds is just too interesting. You will find yourself paraphrasing it to friends all the time. And who knows - maybe even acting on a thing or two!
Favorite bits:
“For example, if the word ‘walk’ is flashed to the right hemisphere, the patient might stand up and walk away. When asked why he is getting up, he might say, ‘I’m going to get a Coke.’ The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing that it has done so.” -p.9
“This difference in maturity between automatic and controlled processes helps explain why we have inexpensive computers that can solve logic, math, and chess problems better than any human beings can (most of us struggle with these tasks), but none of our robots, no matter how costly, can walk through the woods as well as the average six-year-old child (our perceptual and motor skills are superb).” -p.15
“Twin studies generally show that from 50 percent to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their teens rather than in their life experiences.” -p.33
“My research indicates that a small set of innate moral intuitions guide and constrain the world’s many moralities, and one of the intuitions is that the body is a temple housing a soul within. Even people who do not consciously believe in God or the soul are offended by or feel uncomfortable about someone who treats her body like a playground, its sole purpose to provide pleasure.” -p.42
“People who think they are particularly moral are in fact more likely to ‘do the right thing’ and flip the coin, but when the coin flip comes out against them, they find a way to ignore it and follow their own self-interest. Watson called this tendency to value the appearance of morality over the reality ‘moral hypocrisy’” p.62
“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for ever thing one has a mind to do” -p.66 (quoting franklin)
“People acknowledge that their own backgrounds have shaped their views, but such experiences are invariably seen as deepening one’s insights” -p.71
“Sometimes evil falls our of a clear blue sky onto the head of an innocent victim, but most cases are much more complicated, and Baumeister is willing to violate the taboo against ‘blaming the victim’ in order to understand what really happened…..This does not mean that both sides are equally to blame: Perpetrators often grossly overreact and misinterpret (using self-serving biases). But Baumeister’s point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls ‘the myth of pure evil’” -p.74
“Most activities that cost more than a hundred dollars are things we do with other people, but expensive material possessions are often purchased in part to impress other people. Activities connect us to others; objects often separate us.” -p.100
“If in those first few months you take action - you do something that changes your daily life - then the changes might stick. But if you do nothing more than make a resolution (‘I must never forget my new outlook on life’), then you will soon slip back into old habits and pursue old goals.” -p.144
“Don’t edit or censor yourself; don’t worry about grammar or sentence structure; just keep writing. Write about what happened, how you feel about it, and why you feel that way….be sure you have done your best to answer these two questions: Why did this happen? What food might I derive from it?” - p.149
“Younger children know some stories about themselves, but the active and chronic striving to integrate one’s past, present, and future into a coherent narrative begins only in the mid to late teens” -p.150
“For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).” - p.153
“Where the Greeks focused on the character of a person and asked what kind of person we should each aim to become, modern ethics focuses on actions, asking when a particular action is right or wrong.” -p.163
“Where the ancients saw virtue and character at work in everything a person does, our modern conception confines morality to a set of situations that arise for each person only a few times in any given week.” -p.164
“Trying to make children behave ethically by teaching them to reason well is like trying to make a dog happy by wagging its tail. It gets causality backwards.” -p.165
“Awe is the emotion of transcendence….it was always had a link to fear and submission in the presence of something much greater than the self.” -p.202
“The universe is perceived as a unified whole where everything is accepted and nothing is judged or ranked; egocentrism and goal-striving disappear as a person feelings merged with the universe (and often with God); perceptions of time and space are altered; and the person is flooded with feelings of wonder, awe, joy, love, and gratitude” -p.205 (“peak openness”)
“Maslow did not believe religions were literally true (as actual accounts of God and creation), but he thought they were based on the most important truths of life, and he wanted to unite those truths with the truths of science.” -p.206
“It is impossible to analyze ‘the meaning of life’ in the abstract, or in general, or for some mythical and perfectly rational being. Only by knowing the kinds of beings that we actually are, with the complex mental and emotional architecture that we happen to possess, can anyone even begin to ask about what would count as a meaningful life” -p.215
“Why do some people live lives full of zest, commitment, and meaning, but others feel that their lives are empty and pointless?” -p.219...more
Read this book with in Vietnam, which made it extra relevant. But I think I would have enjoyed it either way. An engaging memoir of biking through VieRead this book with in Vietnam, which made it extra relevant. But I think I would have enjoyed it either way. An engaging memoir of biking through Vietnam as a Vietnamese-American. Gave me a lot to think about and I gobbled it right up....more
"So this is a confession: Rather than simple reporting on his progress, I want to see Greg Mortenson succeed. I wish him success because he is fightin"So this is a confession: Rather than simple reporting on his progress, I want to see Greg Mortenson succeed. I wish him success because he is fighting the war on terror the way I think it should be conducted." pg.5
"Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel" hand-lettered sign in Skardu
"Greatnes is always built on this foundation: the ability to appear, speak and act, as the most common man." - Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz
I, too, felt a lot of compassion for Greg Mortenson while reading this book. What I liked most about him was his realness. He wasn't some saintly, overly-driven man. He seems like a somewhat simple guy with a good heart who was able to accomplish a lot through perseverance, hard work, and a bit of luck. The overall message that perhaps terrorism (and other such problems in the world) could be fought with education is one that I truly truly want to believe.
This is also an interesting read culturally, I learned a lot about Pakistan and the Himalayan culture....more
I liked Po Bronson's "What should I do with my life?", and when I heard that this book was a similar style, I knew I would enjoy it.
This is one of thoI liked Po Bronson's "What should I do with my life?", and when I heard that this book was a similar style, I knew I would enjoy it.
This is one of those books that you not only read, but are constantly quoting and paraphrasing to friends while you are reading it and long after, as well. The stories are somewhat memorable but even more memorable is the feeling it leaves you with: families are hard. you are normal. just keep going.
Favorite bits:
“The last book I wrote was about our individual journeys. It began with this line: ‘We are all writing the story of our life.’ As we respond to the challenges and exert some choice over what interests we pursue, we are composing our own life story.
But when it comes to family, it’s a little different. I like to say, ‘We are all constantly rewriting the story of our family.’
When we are born, we are handed this backstory, and then we spend our first decade with little control over how our journey unfolds. In our second decade, our understanding of the story begins to develop. We make conscious connections, notice patterns, and maybe inject some drama into the story, too. In our third decade, we gain some control over where this story will go. We decide how much separation we need from the past in order to hear our own feelings. We ask very threatening questions, such as ‘Do I need a family? What is their purpose?’ And we begin to push to create a family of our own.
Creating families of our own involves both building with new people and changing the relationships we have to those we’ve grown up with. On both fronts, we try to shape the stroy, adding new chapters as a way of changing how the old story lines turn out.”
- p.9
"Family tests us - it tests our ability to see the new in the old, the beauty in the ordinary" - p.9
“We get a lot of things from our families, but one of the most innately wired things we get is a template for how to give and receive love. Even if we have cut off all ties to our families, we carry this template forward in life.
Everyone has different feelings about this template. Some people feel they were taught very well how to love. Others feel they were taught terribly and given nothing but bad habits they’ve had to break. But most people who put themselves in the middle. They were taught some of the pieces, but others are missing.
It is the fashion of the day to complain about these missing pieces - to blame our backstory for not having full prepared us. But I think that’s a mistake. I think we are all meant to search. We have all been taught some of what love is, and the rest we have to go figure out. There is a yearning to fill our gaps, to make up for what we have missed.
This is true for us, and it was true for our parents, and it was true for every generation before them. Unfortunately, it will also be true for our children. This is the nature of life. We have not been cheated. We get this chance at life, but we have to hold up our end of the bargain. We have to learn what love is, learn the parts we missed, and pass it on. That’s the deal”
- p.11
"When we build a mental image of ourselves - we see only these layers upon layers. We conclude, I am not a good person, or I have been hurt very badly. But we are mistaken. This is not our true nature. Inside us all, under all those layers, despite years and years of neglect, there is still a virtuous and noble person, waiting to be let out. We don't become good people. We simple cease, slowly, to be deluded by the layers" -p.34
"It reminded me that the start of a better life was not out there somewhere, out there in the freak-show universe of spiritual guides, but rather, that the start of a better life was my own goodness, and it was already inside me. It had been there all along, under all those layers. Waiting for me. I just had to calm down, stop looking everywhere else for answers, and start letting it out." - p.34
"When the Petrified Forest imagines parenthood, their hears are flooded with the feeling of doors closing, not opening." -p.39
"The size of a family does not correlate with whether or not it respects autonomy. Not to do so is a damaging trait. It destroys more families than it preserves." -p.84
"And while I would never say the past is an excuse, I do think it helps to have done your research. Give people credit for what they've had to cope with." -p.114
"When I visiting in April - exactly one year after Anne's trip to Belize - neither Anne nor Jerome could commit to making it work. However, the stalemate had budged, and here's how: Both had privately come to the realization that even if they married somebody else, they would be in the same situation.
Jerome realized his tendency to withdraw would destroy any relationship he was in. Anne realized her insistence that life be endlessly stimulating would always cause her to act out selfishly." -p.212
"It's said that there are four basic fears inherent to the nature of existence - you can have some of these fears no matter how well you might have been raised. They are the Fear of Dying, the Fear of Having to Choose, the Fear of Ending up Alone, and the Feat that the World Is Intrinsically Meaningless." -p.214
"In Japan, there was a deep tradition of honoring one's family specifically by maintaining the ancestral home. Their language makes a distinction between 'temporary family,' which includes only those around today, and the 'real family,' which includes the ancestors - meaning that just because you're alive doesn't mean you're more important." -p.224
Follows the life of Rabbit, a young man who starts by running away from his wife to find something more and ends up a few miles away with a hooker. HeFollows the life of Rabbit, a young man who starts by running away from his wife to find something more and ends up a few miles away with a hooker. He does seem happier in a very real way, but only by evading responsibility. When he returns to his family, shit hits the proverbial fan and he is thus drawn back into a boring job, a routine life, and a complicated family situation.
In book 2, Rabbit is much older and is left by his wife. He takes care of his son and lets a young runaway and a black drug dealer move in. He seems to change his mind about the world, but it also seems like he thinks it is too late to change his life.
I loved this book. It so magically captures each person's little bubble of existence in this family. They are all experiencing a shared life from compI loved this book. It so magically captures each person's little bubble of existence in this family. They are all experiencing a shared life from completely different angles. To read the account of one is to feel like the previous account has everyone in their family completely wrong. And we most likely do, right? We all misunderstand each other. Or at least, we understand each other, but not in the same way. Our relationships are asymmetrical, even in the closest of life's bonds. Highlights:
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in trying to save money in life she had made many mistakes like this. She reached the point of thinking it would have been better to buy no rug than to buy this rug.
She’d always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.
For a moment it seemed to Chip that his father had become a likable old stranger; but he knew Alfred, underneath, to be a shouter and a punisher.
a pair of hulking “residence halls” that were less like dorms than like vivid premonitions of the hotels in which the students would book rooms for themselves in their well-remunerated futures.
“I’m saying, Melissa, that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There’s supposed to be some element of rebellion. That’s how you define yourself as a person.”
He couldn’t figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.
Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you’d be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he’d established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip’s living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence
“A great worker is almost impossible to fire,” Alfred said. “The process can get very political, though. I have to have alternatives.” “As you wish,” Alfred said. “However, I’ve found that it’s usually best to choose one plan and stick with it. If you don’t succeed here, you can always do something else. But you’ve worked many years to reach this point. One more semester’s hard work won’t hurt you.” “Right.” “You can relax when you have tenure. Then you’re safe.” “Right.”
Of all the things he was wasting—Denise’s money, Julia’s goodwill, his own abilities and education, the opportunities afforded by the longest sustained economic boom in American history—his sheer physical well-being, there in the sunlight by the river, hurt the worst. He ran out of money
He had a spring in his step, an agreeable awareness of his above-average height and his late-summer suntan.
Declines led advances in key indices of paranoia (e.g., his persistent suspicion that Caroline and his two older sons were mocking him), and his seasonally adjusted assessment of life’s futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit clinically depressed.
He saw that he’d made two critical mistakes. He should never have promised Caroline that there would be no more Christmases in St. Jude. And today, when she was limping and grimacing in the back yard, he should have snapped at least one picture of her. He mourned the moral advantages these mistakes had cost him.
The aspects of his life not related to grilling now seemed like mere blips of extraneity between the poundingly recurrent moments when he ignited the mesquite and paced the deck, avoiding smoke.
But his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life,
Over the years he’d collected certain remarks of hers into a kind of personal Decalogue, an All-Time Caroline Ten to which he privately referred for strength and sustenance: Nothing at all like your father. You don’t have to apologize for buying the BMW. Your dad emotionally abuses your mom. I love the taste of your come. Work was the drug that ruined your father’s life. Let’s buy both! Your family has a diseased relationship with food. You’re an incredibly good-looking man. Denise is jealous of what you have. There’s absolutely nothing useful about suffering. He’d subscribed to this credo for years and years—had felt deeply indebted to Caroline for each remark—and now he wondered how much of it was true. Maybe none of it.
Before long, what at first glance had seemed to Gary an absurd possibility—that the till of their marriage no longer contained sufficient funds of love and goodwill to cover the emotional costs that going to St. Jude entailed for Caroline or that not going to St. Jude entailed for him—assumed the contours of something terribly actual.
Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary—of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
His lumbering forces of conventional domestic warfare were no match for this biological weaponry. He cruelly attacked her person; she heroically attacked his disease.
She was sleeping now, silently, like a person feigning sleep. Alfred asleep was a symphony of snoring and whistling and choking, an epic of Z’s. Enid was a haiku. She lay still for hours and then blinked awake like a light switched on.
Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn’t need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly.
A last child was a last opportunity to learn from one’s mistakes and make corrections,
when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before?
he thinks our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it’s out of control, it’s not computers that are making everything virtual, it’s mental health. Everyone’s trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to,
Her idea of Austria was way more vivid than Austria itself.
Robin turned and looked straight into her. “What’s life for?” “I don’t know.” “I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.”
If Mom and Dad were my children, whom I’d created out of nothing without asking their permission, I could understand being responsible for them. Parents have an overwhelming Darwinian hard-wired genetic stake in their children’s welfare. But children, it seems to me, have no corresponding debt to their parents. Basically, I have very little to say to these people. And I don’t think they want to hear what I do have to say.
The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself. There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.
She’d never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy....more
What I love about these stories is that you feel like you get to know each character in so few words. How does Ethan Canin do it? Each character is soWhat I love about these stories is that you feel like you get to know each character in so few words. How does Ethan Canin do it? Each character is so imperfectly real that I have a hard time believing Canin hasn't been each person himself in order to know what it is like.
I wish I could describe why I liked this collection of stories more clearly, but you're just going to have to trust me on this one. It's a winner.
Favorite bits:
"This is a love story. However, its roots are tangled and involve a good bit of my life, and when I recall my life my mood turns sour and I am reminded that no man makes truly proper use of his time. We are blind and small-minded. We are dumb as snails about the importance of things. I'm an average man, without great deeds except maybe one, and that has been to love my wife."
"Francine and I are married now for forty-six years, and I would be a bamboozler to say that I have loved her for any more than half of these. Let us say that for the last year I haven't; let us say that for the last ten, even. Time has made torments of our small differences and tolerances of our passions. This is our state of affairs. Now I stand by myself in our kitchen in the middle of the night; now I lead a secret life. We wake at different hours now, sleep in different corners of the bed. We like different food and different music, keep our clothing in different drawers, and if it can be said that either of us has aspirations, I believe that they are to a different bliss. Also, she is healthy and I am ill. And as for conversation–that feast of reason, that flow of the soul–our house is silent as the bone yard."
I read this for book club. I'd previously read "Between the world and me" and feel that this piece of writing must have been a big source of inspiratiI read this for book club. I'd previously read "Between the world and me" and feel that this piece of writing must have been a big source of inspiration for Ta Nehisi Coates. Beautiful, poetic writing. Short but packs a punch. ...more
The picture painted in this book was very vivid for me: an all-boys boarding school where art and literariness are prized and yet there is a certain bThe picture painted in this book was very vivid for me: an all-boys boarding school where art and literariness are prized and yet there is a certain baseness to the way the boys relate to each other. In other words: talent is important, but family money and prestige trump all. I love the descriptions of boys trying so hard to seem careless. I don't think I had enough insight in high school to notice that anyone did that, but I'm sure they did. Tobias Wolff really drew me in and I found myself reading this book in just 3 sittings.
The overall message is about doubleness of character and "authenticity." When studying philosophy I always hated this word because it is so difficult to talk about and it becomes immediately obvious when it is dissected that being true to oneself is an impossibility given the fluidity of human experience and truth. And yet, in this novel it was entirely clear to me that the problem the main character (and all characters?) was having was one of authenticity.
Wolff paints a picture of an obvious case of deceit and a less obvious one and shows us how similar they are. Sure, the young man does copy a story and submit it to an essay contest. But is that so different from all of the tiny lies we tell each other for the sake of appearances every single day?
Favorite bits:
"Once crystallized, consciousness of influence would have doomed the collective and necessary fantasy that our work was purely our own." -pg.14
"For a moment I saw this place as I had first seen it: how beautiful it was, and how odd. I felt its seclusion and how we'd come to resemble each other in that seclusion. We dressed so much alike that the inflections we did allow ourselves–tasseled loafers for the playboy, a black turtleneck for the rebel–were probably invisible to an outsider. Our clothes, the way we wore our hair, the very set of our mouths, all this marked us like tribal tattoos." -pg.35
"It was a nuance of etiquette as inexplicable a a joke, but George wasn't snob enough to get it." -pg.43
"When I see a rhyme in a poem, I know I'm being lied to. Go ahead, laugh! It's true–rhyme's a completely bankrupt device. It's just wishful thinking. Nostalgia." -pg.44
"Make no mistake, he said: a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life." -pg.47
"He didn't look old; he looked eternal." -pg.48
"In print, under his great name, they had the look of inevitability; in his voice you caught the hesitation and perplexity behind them, the sound of a man brooding them into being." -pg.50
"All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home." -pg.52
"When classes started I still hadn't begun my story; and the longer I went without writing, the more convinced I became of its inevitable superiority." -pg.71
"The truth of these stories didn't come as a set of theories. You felt it on the back of your neck." -pg.97
"We speak of self-consciousness as a burden or a problem, and so it is–the problem being how to use it to bring ourselves out of exile. Whereas our tendency is to lose ourselves in the distance, wouldn't you say?" -pg.132...more
This book is so important. The main character is raised as a woman and then realizes that he is really a man. Getting a glimpse into what that experieThis book is so important. The main character is raised as a woman and then realizes that he is really a man. Getting a glimpse into what that experience might feel like was very interesting and eye-opening. I highly recommend this book!
Highlights:
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that witty lady’s opinion on the German language, which held that German wasn’t good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn’t interrupt.
Part of this essence came from Father Mike’s perfect contentment at being only five foot four. His shortness had a charitable aspect to it, as though he had given away his height.
Here it comes, I thought. The first ex-boyfriend had been summoned. Soon the rest would follow. They would file around the table, presenting their deficiencies, telling of their addictions, their cheating hearts. After that, I would be called on to present my own ragged gallery. And here is where my first dates generally go wrong.
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve
Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
(Milton came home every night; he didn’t drink or womanize but, preoccupied with business worries, he began to leave a little more of himself at the diner each day, so that the man who returned to us seemed less and less present, a kind of robot who carved turkeys and filmed holidays but who wasn’t really there at all.)
We weren’t prejudiced against them. We wanted to include them in our society if they would only act normal!
There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.
Until we came to Baker & Inglis my friends and I had always felt completely American. But now the Bracelets’ upturned noses suggested that there was another America to which we could never gain admittance. All of a sudden America wasn’t about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!
He was a great teacher, Mr. da Silva. He treated us with complete seriousness, as if we eighth graders, during fifth period, might settle something scholars had been arguing about for centuries. He listened to our chirping, his hairline pressing
Talent is a kind of intelligence.
So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
I transferred my feeling for the Object onto Jerome and it was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.
The adolescent ego is a hazy thing, amorphous, cloudlike. It wasn’t difficult to pour my identity into different vessels. In a sense, I was able to take whatever form was demanded of me. I only wanted to know the dimensions.
To cut off your hair after a breakup was a feminine reaction. It was a way to start over, to renounce vanity, to spite love.
I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.
Every morning a great wall of fog descends upon the city of San Francisco. It begins far out at sea. It forms over the Farallons, covering the sea lions on their rocks, and then it sweeps onto Ocean Beach, filling the long green bowl of Golden Gate Park. The fog obscures the early morning joggers and the lone practitioners of tai chi. It mists up the windows of the Glass Pavilion. It creeps over the entire city, over the monuments and movie theaters, over the Panhandle dope dens and the flophouses in the Tenderloin. The fog covers the pastel Victorian mansions in Pacific Heights and shrouds the rainbow-colored houses in the Haight. It walks up and down the twisting streets of Chinatown; it boards the cable cars, making their clanging bells sound like buoys; it climbs to the top of Coit Tower until you can’t see it anymore; it moves in on the Mission, where the mariachi players are still asleep; and it bothers the tourists. The fog of San Francisco, that cold, identity-cleansing mist that rolls over the city every day, explains better than anything else why that city is what it is. After the Second World War, San Francisco was the main point of reentry for sailors returning from the Pacific. Out at sea, many of these sailors had picked up amatory habits that were frowned upon back on dry land. So these sailors stayed in San Francisco, growing in number and attracting others, until the city became the gay capital, the homosexual Hauptstadt. (Further evidence of life’s unpredictability: the Castro is a direct outcome of the military-industrial complex.) It was the fog that appealed to those sailors because it lent the city the shifting, anonymous feeling of the sea, and in such anonymity personal change was that much easier. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether the fog was rolling in over the city or whether the city was drifting out to meet it.
When you travel like I did, vague about destination and with an open-ended itinerary, a holy-seeming openness takes over your character. It’s the reason the first philosophers were peripatetic. Christ, too.
Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.
I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
I’m not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness.
Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye....more
In college, I fell in love with ancient Chinese philosophy. I had a professor who specialized in JohnThis was one of the best books I read this year.
In college, I fell in love with ancient Chinese philosophy. I had a professor who specialized in John Dewey and Chinese philosophy and hearing him compare and contrast the Western vs Eastern assumptions when it came to philosophy blew my mind. The basic assumptions of our culture: that individual achieve matters. That individuality is important at all. That truth and justice are more important than harmony. I couldn’t believe these were not taken for granted all over the world!
This book takes those basic ideas I learned in Chinese Philosophy and expands upon them based on Hessler’s experience teaching in a small city for 2 years. His story has its ups and its downs and through it you learn all of the intricate complexities that make China the country that it is. It isn’t just the underlying philosophies that Chinese people share - it’s the intricacies of language, customs, history - everything! Also, Hessler is a fantastic writer, so I breezed right through this book despite the fact that it is basically a 400 page ethnography of China.
Favorite bits:
“I looked at the terraced hills and noticed how the people had changed the earth, taming it into dizzying staircases of rice paddies; but the Chinese looked at the people and saw how they had been shaped by the land.” -p.6
“They wrote about my foreign nose, which impressed them as impossibly long and straight, and many of them wrote about my blue eyes. This was perhaps the strangest detail of all, because my eyes are hazel - but my students had read that foreigners had blue eyes. and they saw what they wanted to see.” -p.16
“We were exchanging cliches without knowing it: I had no idea that classical Chinese poetry routinely makes scallions of women’s fingers, and they had no idea that Sonnet Eighteens poetic immortality had been reviewed so many times that it nearly died, a poem with a number tagged to its toe.” -p.44
“I found that I couldn’t read literary criticism, because its academic stiffness was so far removed from the grace of good writing.” -p.45
“Very rarely did a critic seem to react to a text; rather the text was twisted so that it reacted neatly to whatever ideas the critic held sacred. there were Marxist critics, Feminist critics, and Post-Colonial critics; and almost invariably they wielded their theories like molds. forcing books inside and squeezing out a neatly-shaped product.” -p.45
“Even as late as the 1800s it had been illegal for a Chinese to teach the language to foreigners, and a number Chinese were imprisoned and even executed for tutoring young Englishmen.” -p.61
“Nowhere else had I felt so strongly that there are two types of history, nature’s and man’s, and that one is a creature of cycles while the other, with mixed results, aims always at straightness-progress, development. control.” -p.106
“Cold was like hunger; it had a way of simplifying everything.” -p.115
“In Chinese, the Korean War is know as the ‘War of Resistance Against the Americans and in Support of the Koreans,’ and it is difficult to discuss a war with that name and make the Americans look good. And the Chinese user personal pronouns when they speak of national affairs - it’s ‘our China’ and ‘your America.’ I found this to be a small but critical quirk in the language; every political discussion quickly became polarized, and every aspect of America - both its successes and its failures - became by personal affair.” -p.147
“I realized that as a thinking person his advantage lay precisely in his lack of formal education. Nobody told him what to think, and thus he was free to think clearly.” -p.173
“…both its pathetic smallness and its amazing bigness; the fact that I could step across it easily and the fact that is stretched for fifteen hundred miles - all of that showed how far the Chinese could go with a bad idea.” -.192 (about the Great Wall)
“But like most Chinese, the majority were but one generation removed from serious poverty. What I saw as freedom and culture, they saw as misery and ignorance.” -p.214
“To be slightly but certifiably disabled, and to have twin sons- that was fantasy; it didn’t happen in real life; people wrote books abut good fortune of that sort.” -p.237
“Ho Wei was completely different from my American self: he was friendly, he was eager to talk with anybody, and he took great pleasure in in the most inane conversations. In a simple way he was funny; by saying a few words in the local dialect he could be endlessly entertaining to the people in Fuling. Also Ho Wei was stupid, which was what I liked most about him. He spoke with an accent; he had lousy grammar; and he laughed at the simple mistakes that he made. People were comfortable with somebody that stupid.” -p.238 (on his Chinese persona)
“When the Chinese commit suicide, it’s common for them to jump off things - bridges, buildings, cliffs. Sometimes in the countryside they eat pesticide. They tend to do a much more thorough job of killing themselves than Americans do, especially American women, who often take pills and are saved by having their stomachs pumped. Chinese women are more likely to commit suicide than Chinese men. More than half of the female suicides in the world take place in China, where the suicide rate for women is nearly five times the world average. China is the only country on earth in which more women kill themselves than men.” -p.274...more
After a string of books I read and put down after a few chapters, I was really happy that my book club chose this one. The writing is phenomenal and t After a string of books I read and put down after a few chapters, I was really happy that my book club chose this one. The writing is phenomenal and the story line pulls you in. Favorite bits:
When I find myself in a homogeneous phase of my life, I like to have a caption for it.
I still need to concentrate on how much of where I am now is Denoon’s influence and how much is normal personal evolution. Denoon is pushing into this before he’s historically due, naturally.
I have either a talent or a weakness for mimicry, depending on how you look at it.
Africa. But Botswana is frustrating. Gaborone was built from the ground up in the nineteen sixties, and except for the squatter section along the Lobatse road, it looks more like a college town in the American Southwest than anything else. There’s no national costume.
There are barriers. Americans suffer the most. They come to Botswana wanting to be lovely to Africans. A wall confounds them. Behind it is something they sense is interesting.
His beauty made him unusually goodnatured. You could revile him and be sure he wouldn’t mind for long because when all was said and done he was still going to be the beautiful six foot plus guy you or somebody else wanted. This was not vanity. It was reality.
A utopia I would join in a minute is a society which could be communist or capitalist, anything, except that no woman member of it ever underwent sex unless she was hot. Pretending to be hot bears a distinct resemblance to self-rape, but it’s a rape accompanied by boredom instead of fear.
I am the Platonic idea of a good sport.
I grew up clinging to the idea that either I was original in an unappreciated way or that I could be original—this later—by incessant striving and reading and taking simple precautions like never watching television again in my life.
the only man born of woman with absolutely no preference for which side of the bed he slept on.
One difference between women and men is that women really want paradise. Men say they do, but what they mean by it is absolute security, which they can obtain only through utter domination of the near and dear and the environment as far as the eye can see, how else?
So it was none other than Nelson Denoon! He was so famously sardonic! So heretical! He was so interdisciplinary! Economics, anthropology, economic anthropology, you name it in the policy sciences, not to mention development proper and being in actual charge of a sequence of famous rural development projects in Africa!
Here was the ultimate beneficiary of the academic star system and a star himself, who was somehow against it and reviled it at all times, which only made him more of a star, more in demand, more invited to conferences, always a panelist, never a rapporteur. Here was the acme of what you could get out of academia: teach where you like, get visiting fellowships and lectureships, grants, get quoted, jet around, rusticate a few years in the bush if you felt like it.
Eminence is not the best medium for marriages, is what I was thinking.
It became the kind of scene that makes you want to be a writer so you can capture a transient unique form of social agony being undergone by people who have it made in every way, the observer excepted.
I had a flash of the feeling I used to get from time to time of the Batswana as spectators at a great game played by whites called Running Your Country.
He had thought these questions into the ground. This wasn’t manifesting as arrogance but as an unsuppressible certainty, which can be just as irritating.
my idea of what the movie I Wake Up Screaming is about is a woman who has to keep dating to find her soulmate and she’s had to get dentures. I have very long-range anxieties.
One of my most imperishable objections to the world is the existence of assortative mating, how everyone at some level ends up physically with just who they deserve, at least to the eye of some ideal observer, unless money or power deforms the process. This is equivalent to being irritated at photosynthesis or at inhabiting a body that has to defecate periodically, I am well aware.
Why can’t every mating in the world be on the basis of souls instead of inevitably and fundamentally on the match between physical envelopes?
In Botswana, in the villages, the practice is for women to produce a child first, to advertise their marriageability.
One attractive thing about me is that I’m never bored, because during any caesura my personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives is there for me.
He seemed to think that the idea that you should know when you’re having fun and concentrate on it passim was original. I tried to suggest that this looked to me a lot like our old Aquarian friend Mindfulness, but he wouldn’t have it.
The fact is I laugh at dreams. They seem to me to be some kind of gorgeous garbage.
This could be one of the sources of the self-confidence you envy in rich women, not that the sources of self-confidence in the rich are not as numberless as the sands of the Gobi.
I noticed with disgust a trace of elation in my reaction to what things had come to. Apparently I was furtively pleased that the level of difficulty had gone up.
I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world.
I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus—the word was emphasized in some way—of face-to-face attention.
Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit.
He would say only slightly facetiously that the main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.
My life is taking forever, I remember thinking.
So he was different. Or was it just that I was dealing for the first time in my life with an actual mature male, a concept which up until then I had considered an essentially literary construct and a way of not asking the question of whether or not in fact the real world reduced to a layer cake of differing grades of hysteria, with the hysteria of the ruling sex being simply more suppressed and expressing itself in ritualized forms like preparedness or memorizing lifetime batting averages that no one associates with hysteria. I was surprised at how pleased I felt to get such deep, easy, thorough laughter out of him.
work was transparent, unabstract. I was halfway into a state at right angles to my usual American median state of being in which you are in perpetual anxiety about the next thing that’s supposed to transpire in your lifeplan, to the point that you can barely enjoy the thing you’ve just done or the plateau you’ve reached. Can you get pregnant? You do, but then will your child be healthy? Will it be popular, productive, and if it’s a girl will she be assertive but not abrasive?
that day a quirk of his seized me that I felt would destroy me. It was this. When he was given something liquid, soup or a beverage of any kind, he would swill the first sip around in his mouth for a noticeable period before swallowing.
It turns out that being in a symposium lying down in the small hours when all you want is to be asleep is a little akin to being asked to bleed to death.
Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity?
My reaction may have been due to feeling totally overbooked on the woman question, especially as it applied to reconciling my supposed nobility and independence with the requirements of my campaign to get Denoon, who was seeming more and more like the store of all value to me, whatever my cavils.
Nelson did have a trait of occasionally branching off into an intense static condition of empathy for some victimized group he hadn’t thought about in a while. It was a trait that was en route to the borderline of neurosis, in my humble opinion, and was part of his ongoing great question, the question of which contemporary evil was the actual worst and therefore the one you should really be directing your life effort against.
This was the way it was in those days. We seemed to coast over everything, up and over, a good thickness of rushing water between us and the boulders underneath.
For me love is like this: you’re in one room or apartment which you think is fine, then you walk through a door and close it behind you and find yourself in the next apartment, which is even better, larger, more floorspace, a better view. You’re happy there and then you go into the next apartment and close the door and this one is even better. And the sequence continues, but with the odd feature that although this has happened to you a number of times, you forget: each time your new quarters are manifestly better and each time it’s breathtaking, a surprise, something you’ve done nothing to deserve or make happen. You never intend to go from one room onward to the next—it just happens. You notice a door, you go through, and you’re delighted again.
And of course every topic I ventured was in reality a Trojan horse containing the questions What are you thinking of doing next? and when?
what I really wanted was to shout at him about the gigantic quid pro quo he was presenting, as in We can be together forever but only on the head of a pin, in Tsau. I was tired of the good news and the bad news always linking up.
Every other man I had regularly spent nights with was like a wild animal over his sacred sleep, because—had I conceivably forgotten?—he had to work the next day, in caps, as if I didn’t.
I needed to be kept from succumbing to a certain metaphor for marriage I was recurring to too often, that is, of marriage as a form of slowed-down wrestling where the two parties keep trying different holds on each other until one of them gets tired and goes limp, at which point you have the canonical happy marriage, voilà.
the convention of the female speaking first when an unresolved conflict has gone on long enough was alive and well in our house.
And what would I do when it turned out that the most interesting thing I could tell anyone was anything I was willing to divulge about the great social genius Nelson Denoon.
Certainly was a word totally external to our idioverse. It was from another dimension....more
I took relatively few notes while reading this book. But that was not due to a lack of interest. In fact, it was quite the opposite: I was so involvedI took relatively few notes while reading this book. But that was not due to a lack of interest. In fact, it was quite the opposite: I was so involved in the plot of this book that I had a hard time stepping back long enough to analyze the writing. The writing was, however, stellar. Overall, an excellent novel. Will be looking to read more of his work.
Favorite bits:
"Together they contemplate the picture: the young wife wit the daring clothes and gaudy jewelry striding through the front door, impatiently snugging the air; the husband, colorless Mir. Right, aproned, string a pot in the steaming kitchen. Reversals: the stuff of bourgeois comedy." -p.14
"…to me, anima-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat." -p.73
"He has never been afraid to follow a thought down its winding track, and he is not afraid now." -p.76
"'Forgive me, Lucy' he says. 'For being one of the two mortals assigned to usher you into the world and for not turning out to be a better guide." -p.79
"Her questions are intrusive, but Rosaling has never had qualms about being intrusive. 'You shared by bed for ten years,' she once said- 'Why should you have secrets from me?' 'Lucy and I still get on well,' he replies. 'But not well enough to live together.' 'The story of your life.' 'Yes.' There is silence while they contemplate, from their respective angles, the story of his life." -p.189
"Regret: a regrettable note on which to go out." -p.190 ...more
I love a good YA novel! This was an easy read and a tear-jerker.
My highlights:
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sadI love a good YA novel! This was an easy read and a tear-jerker.
My highlights:
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.
“Do you always think this much, Charlie?” “Is that bad?” I just wanted someone to tell me the truth. “Not necessarily. It’s just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.” “Is that bad?” “Yes.”
“Charlie, we accept the love we think we deserve.”
“I feel infinite."
My dad had glory days once. I’ve seen pictures of him when he was young. He was a very handsome man. I don’t know any other way to put it. He looked like all old pictures look. Old pictures look very rugged and young, and the people in the photographs always seem a lot happier than you are.
I just hope I remember to tell my kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope that they believe me.
Dear friend, Do you enjoy holidays with your family? I don’t mean your mom and dad family, but your uncle and aunt and cousin family? Personally, I do. There are several reasons for this. First, I am very interested and fascinated by how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other. Second, the fights are always the same.
Sam and Patrick looked at me. And I looked at them. And I think they knew. Not anything specific really. They just knew. And I think that’s all you can ever ask from a friend.
It’s like when you are excited about a girl and you see a couple holding hands, and you feel so happy for them. And other times you see the same couple, and they make you so mad. And all you want is to always feel happy for them because you know that if you do, then it means that you’re happy, too.
The movie itself was very interesting, but I didn’t think it was very good because I didn’t really feel different when it was over.
At one point two days ago, she was talking about books, and she included a lot of books I had read. And when I told her that I had read them, she asked me very long questions that were really just her ideas with a question mark put at the end. The only thing I could say was either “yes” or “no.”
She also said that people who try to control situations all the time are afraid that if they don’t, nothing will work out the way they want....more
This book made me think a lot about what it means to "succeed" in life. I loved the dark undertones and didn't really understand the ending. Overall, This book made me think a lot about what it means to "succeed" in life. I loved the dark undertones and didn't really understand the ending. Overall, however, one of my favorite Steinbeck novels so far. Maybe because I read it last summer when I was thinking a lot about what I wanted to do with my life. ...more
I will say that I was surprised about a few things.
First of all, as a friend who also read A.K. last year poWhat is there to say? An absolute classic.
I will say that I was surprised about a few things.
First of all, as a friend who also read A.K. last year pointed out, it is difficult to tell whether Tolstoy is a feminist or not. A woman, and a complex one at that, is one of the main characters of this book written about and in the late 1800s. But also, the main male character, Levin, who is supposedly somewhat modeled on Tolstoy himself, seems to have a much more complex and advanced inner life.
I learned a lot about Russian society of the late 1800s from the copious footnotes. What a time! Seems like a great time to be a man of society and a crappy time to be a peasant or a woman. ...more
This book, like all of David Sedaris' books, was hilarious. A nice light read!
The whole thing was entertaining, but I highlighted this:
"I asked if he This book, like all of David Sedaris' books, was hilarious. A nice light read!
The whole thing was entertaining, but I highlighted this:
"I asked if he always cried during comedies, and he accused me of being grossly insensitive, a charge I'm trying to plea-bargain down to simply obnoxious." -p.137
This is the best book I've read in years. Olive Kitteridge as a complex and flawed character, and thus she comes off as incredible real. I gained new This is the best book I've read in years. Olive Kitteridge as a complex and flawed character, and thus she comes off as incredible real. I gained new insights on relationships from this book and was brought to tears by some of the stories of the silent emotional suffering so many people endure in their everyday lives. Also appreciated the setting of Maine.
"Because what did they have now, except for each other, and what could you do if it was not even quite that?" - pg.139
This is the perfect book to read on a plane. It is so simple yet fascinating that you can lose yourself in it for hours. I loved the characters and crThis is the perfect book to read on a plane. It is so simple yet fascinating that you can lose yourself in it for hours. I loved the characters and cried on more than one occasion while reading it. It was full if interesting facts and insights so I found myself having a hard time finding anything in particular to highlight. The kind of book that gives you a fresh perspective in an entirely accessible manner.
"…feelings are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and it if is a happy picture they smile and it it is a sad picture they cry." -p.119 ...more
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