Status Updates From The Waves

“I see wild birds, and impulses wilder than the wildest birds strike from my wild heart.” (40)
“The distance closes for ever in a point, and we for ever open the distance wide again.” (43)
“I open my body, I shut my body at my will. Life is just beginning. I now break into my hoard of life.” (44)
“But my body passes vagrant as a bird’s shadow.” (46)
a world’s emerging wideness yet construction..

I am Bernard; I am Byron; I am this, that, and the other... I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.

p 36 has maybe some of the clearest and best quotes so far… an awakening groundedness, a desire to know oneself and one’s place fully and to be desired …

Both despise me for copying what they do; but Susan sometimes teaches me, for instance, how to tie a bow, while Jinny has her own knowledge but keeps it to herself. They have friends to sit by. They have things to say privately in corners. But I attach myself only to names and faces; and hoard them like amulets against disaster.

“There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing, all is quickness and triumph.” (31)
“I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life.” (33)
Coherence is a (learned) trap?

in a dangerous and wild and unpredictable world, there is a comfort in (certain) fantasy, even in its violent wildness, which didacticism and the dull constancy of reality (its “profanities”) constantly contradicts (and opposes and threatens…)

when “death” becomes real and not simply the imagined end of a hero’s narrative, the soliloquy played onto the shadow of an adoring audience, what then…?

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook - fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases. Under B shall come ‘Butterfly powder.’ If, in my novel, I describe the sun on the window-sill, I shall look under B and find butterfly powder. That will be useful.” (24)
“Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.” (26)