Rob Baker > Recent Status Updates

"No one can live without a reason for existnece. It may change from time to time, but there is always a driving force of some kind: pleasure, duty, fame, the accumulation of wealth, good works, thievery, destruction, murder....Mine, generally speaking, is to persuade others to do what is best for me" (35).

"Why did I attract these weird old women?...They all wanted to adpot me in some way, and for the price of their care and influence, have me resemble them" (220).

"I was still wearing Betsy's white blouse and dirndl skirt. They drooped a bit now, as I hadn't washed them in my three weeks at home. The sweaty cotton gave off a sour but friendly smell.

I hadn't washed my hair for three weeks either.

I hand't slept for seven nights" (127).

"Marco's small, flickering smile reminded me of a snake I'd teased in the Bronx Zoo. When I tapped my finger on the stout cage glass the snake had opened its clockwork jaws and seemed to smile. Then it struck and struck and struck at the invisible pane until I moved off" (106).

"I remembered Buddy Willad saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think that maybe it was strue that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state" (88).

"I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman (giving birth) in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it, and she would go home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again"

While "The Bell Jar" would not be my instincive first choice of the book to pick up the day after finishing "Les Misérables" (I would have gone with something lighter), it is my book club choice that I have to have read soon, and it is a book I've wanted to read since I was in high school (1974-1978), so I guess it's time :)

Hugo can ramble:

"At what solution did he stop? What determination did he take? What was, within himself, his final answer to the incorruptible demand of fatality? What door did he decide to open? What side of his life did he resolve to close and to condemn? Between all the unfathomable precipices which surrounded him, what was his choice? What extremity did he accept? To which of these gulfs did he bow his head?"

"To realise his dream. To whom is that given? There must be elections for that in heaven; we are all unconscious candidates; the angels vote" (1184).

Less than 100 pages to go!

And,turning towards Marius and Cosette, with arms extended in blessing, he cried: Permission to adore each other” (159).

Only Victor Hugo could go on for four pages about what it would be like to drown in poop…