Rob Baker > Recent Status Updates

"'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!! 😂 😂 😂 😂

Since I first heard it 15ish years ago, Gregori Allegri's "Miserere Mei" has become one of my favorite pieces. I listen to it almost daily.

This is the first time I've seen it mentioned in lit. What a strange reference:

"The poor good woman was a maid. Sultan, her cat, who could have miauled the Miserere of Allegri at the Sistine Chapel, had filled her heart and sufficed for the amount of passion she had" (597).

"And you will remember this: that he has seen you,
that your world has opened gently and without warning
and you are real and standing in the center of its blossom" (16).

--from "Easter"

"For there are many great deeds done in the small struggles of life....Noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees, which no renown rewards" (588).

Slowly, slowly trudging my way through this...

"the spider I roused last night clutched her eggs--
a magnificent orb of gray and white--
tightly in her jaws. We think we know all
there is worth knowing, while around us,
animals live small brave lives" (8).

"To err is human; to loaf is Parisian".

"Theodule was...the favourite of Aunt Gillenormand, who preferred him because she did not see him. Not seeing people permits us to imagine in them every perfection" (552).

For fifty pages, nothing has happened.

When the story is moving forward, it's a great book. When the plot comes to a standstill, and there are pages upon pages of obscure names, places, and events that modern readers know nothing about, it's very tedious, and ten pages feels like a lot to read.

"Facts and men were judged there. They ridiculed the century, which dispensed with comprehending it (539)."

"She was sad with an obscure sadness of which she had not the secret herself. There was in her whole person the stupor of a life ended but never commenced" (528).

Following a twenty-ish page aside glorifying Paris, a character portrait of M. Gillenormand, whose connection to the past 520 pages is, as yet, unclear:

"M. Gillenormand admired his own discernment in everything and pronounced himself very sagacious; this is one of his sayings:

'I have indeed some penetration; I can tell when a flea bites me, from what woman it comes'" (521).

"...those humble yet august souls (the nuns), who dare to live upon the very confines of the great mystery, waiting between the world closed to them and heaven not yet opened, turned towards daylight not yet seen, with only the happiness of thinking that they know where it is; their aspirations directed towards the abyss and the unknown...and half borne away at certain times by the deep pulsations of Eternity" (454).

"We have a duty to perform, to cultivate the human soul, to defend mystery against miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd; to admit nothing that is inexplicable excepting what is necessary; to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the face of religion; to remove the vermin from the garden of God" (450).