Rob Baker > Recent Status Updates

2/3 done!

Started reading this on April 5. This may be the longest it's ever taken me to read any book, except for the Bible which I purposefully read over the course of a year.

"God is behind all things, but all things hide God...

"Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees."

"They soemtimes made a pleasure excursion to go and see the sun rise, a gentle joy suited to those who are entering upon life and those who are leaving it" (783).

"The universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling all in the invisible mystery of the emanations, losing no dream from a single sleep, sowing an animlcule here, crumbling a star there, making everything blossom into God, entangling, all activiites in the obscurity of the dizzying mechanism.

A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac."

"The evening had that serenity whic buries the sorrows of man under a strangely dreary yet eternal joy" (752).

"Very few minds comprehend the divine tongue. The most sagacious, the most calm, the most profound, decipher slowly, and when they arrive with their text, the need has long gone by; there are already 20 translations in the public square.

From each translation a party is born, and from each misreading a faction; and each party believes it has the only true text, and each faction believes that it possesses the light"

Back to another dry 50-ish page interlude. Sigh.

"'I lick your paws this morning! I will gnaw your heart tonight!'"

"His eye was full of the base delight of a feeble, cruel and cowardly animal, which can finally prostrate that of which it has stood in awe, and insult what it has flattered, the joy of a jackal beginning to tear a sick bull, dead enough not to be able to defend himself, alive enough yet to suffer" (688).

The main story has picked up once more, and, behold!, it's interesting again :)

"He had ... an eye that would turn your pockets inside out. You might have said of this eye, not that it penetrated, but that it ransacked" (667).

"How the boy dragged
from his bed to watch his brother beaten
in the basement will have the harder time
adjusting. How all the stories walk through
the valley of darkness. How children will try
to save each other, how adults try,
too, the urge to give and give, to brace
two feet against the rocking boat
of the world to steady it (36).

"When man has reached the last extremity...the light of day seems to diea away without, the moral light dies out within; in this gloom, man meets the weakness of woman and childhood, and puts them by force to ignominious uses.

Then all horrors are possible. Despair is surrounded by fragile walls which all open into vice or crime" (642).

"Mouth's rite of passage, like the kiss,
attracts and terrifies, requires practice.

Like spitting seeds at targets--
the aim, the strike, the splatter,

the make-believe that nothing matters...

But then one day the heart is sunk
in disappointment, a trapped bear pacing

in an empty moat, and curse words become
battered stairs headed nowhere, up into soured air" (33).

--from "Cussing"

HALFWAY!!

"Such men, when towards midnight, on a lone boulevard, you meet them or catch a glimpse of them, are terrifying. They seem not men, but forms fashioned of the living dark...You would say that they are an integral portion of the darkness, that they are not distinct from it, and that it is only temporarily and to live for a few minutes a monstrous life, that they are disaggregated from the night" (628).

Best chapter title so far:

"Adventures of the Letter U Abandoned to Conjecture" (Marius, Book Sixth, Chapter VII).

"the young hope that something good might happen
between us, and all we had to do was ask" (25).

What the...?!

"Marius was now a fine-looking young man, of medium height, with heavy jet black hair, a high intelligent brow, large and PASSIONATE NOSTRILS..."

My goal today is to find someone with passionate nostrils!! 😂 😂 😂 😂