Tobin Moffatt > Recent Status Updates

Transience.. 😞

A propos holiday re-read.

Sit not in this three-legged chair, nonfunctional as it is, ergonomically preposterous, splintery, and covered in dirt, but submit to the apprenticeship of the carpenter who designed it, that you may concern yourself with furniture no more.

Chapters 1-10 ✔️ : Confusing…

‘Hickman, a great over-grown, lank-haired chubby boy, who would be hunched and punched by everybody; and go home with his finger in his eye, and tell his mother.’

‘“Nobody in our poetry group is in any way associated with this Sōseki fellow, and it would be unreasonable if you gentleman were to condemn my poems by reason of some such imagined association. I took great pains with the construction of this work, and I would like in particular to draw your attention to my telling contrast of the bitter world with the sweetness of a kiss.” ‘

‘ “You had a nap? That’s good. If one could only sleep during the daytime and then still sleep at night. . . why, nothing could be more wonderful.”

(Libra Vox recording)

This is so disturbing.

'But remember that there would not be any merit in your compliance, if it were *not* to be against your own will.'

‘. . . and if, like maggots wriggling in the fabric of this world, we are to keep thrashing about down here, we do need rest to do it . . . Even my master, that timid but complaining crank in the grinding mechanism of our national education, sometimes takes a weekday off. I am no cog, I am a cat, a being sensitive to the most subtle shades of thought and feeling.’

It makes me happy to know that in Japan they assign this in junior high school a la Tarjei Vessas’ The Birds in Norway, or Bruno Schulz in Poland. Bravo not-Canada places.

‘ . . . Next we may ask to what extent did human effort contribute to the creation of heaven and earth, and the answer is that it contributed nothing. What right, then, do human beings hold to decide that things not of their own creation nevertheless belong to them? . . . all land-ownership is unnatural and irrational.’

‘If whiskers establish sauciness, every cat is impudent.”

‘ . . . but made a virtue of necessity . . .’