Joseph > Recent Status Updates

Caulfield: English is my best subject.
English teacher: Oh what have you read this year?
Caulfield: Romeo & Juliet. I didn't like it 'cause Mercutio died.

All he needs is a pair of hipster glasses and to replace his cigarettes with weed and you have 2019.

I really don't think Caulfield cares about the story he's telling.

I'm starting to remember why stream of consciousness annoys me.

Well that certainly explains the chip on his shoulder.

Don't you love when your professor assigns his own book?

Yeah I can see why this was edgy in 1951.

In the city, on the beach that was dotted with dog excrement and belonged to the people living in the buildings that had cropped up all along the shore like obscene, scabbing eczema, there was no plaque to remind the inhabitants that in this place human beings had awaited their immanent death. There was nothing anywhere along the shore, and nothing in the town either. Music came drifting out of a seaside café.

There is so much variety in these selections that I'm not sure what I should comment on while I read.

The screen creates the illusion that what it shows is taking place somewhere else, even though the sounds you hear are really, physically threatening in their proximity. But at night you shake off that illusion; the eye takes over from the camera and charges the individual experience with sensation and immediacy: the war is what is happening here and now, not what is reported on the news.

New rule, always have a pencil for highlighting the great lines. This has some gems. Preview: The Dialogues of Plato have been written; no one will ever do them better; and however anyone did them they would have to be substantially the same; and if a student having read them persists in skepticism, he has demonstrated his incapacity for the further study of philosophy.

Music is the voice of silence, and so it follows that to enter with Our Beloved Lord into that prayer of quiet and to pray to Our Blessed Lady that He might lead us there, we must learn to speak that language too, that is, we must know music and especially the music of words which is poetry.

The good of a book lies in it's being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind.