Rob Baker > Recent Status Updates

"There mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling nor more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious or more infinite.

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul" (191).

"In vain we chisel, as best we can, the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny reappears continually" (177).

"Some people are malicious from the mere necessity of talking. Their conversation, tattling in the drawing-room, gossip in the ante-chamber, is like those fireplaces that use up wood rapidly; they need a great deal of fuel; the fuel is their neighbour....

The malicious have a dark happiness" (155, 158).

"'If we would take a little pains, the nettle would be useful; we neglect it, and it becomes harmful. Then we kill it. How much men are like the nettle...

'My friends, remember this, that there are no bad herbs, and no bad men, there are only bad cultivators'" (143)

"Fantine, in those labyrinths of the hill of the Pantheon, where so many ties are knotted and unloosed, long fled from Tholomyès, but in such a way as always to meet him again.

There is a way of avoiding a person which resembles a search" (107).

Love the heightened emotion of Romantic literature:

"'Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God" (92).

"...the whole world was to this good and rare priest a permanent object of sadness seeking to be consoled" (51).

"What was more needed ...between gardening in the day time, and contemplation at night? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired. A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon.

At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon; a few flowers on the earth, and al the stars in the sky" (49).

Lots of names and historical references from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. An annotated edition could be handy, but all the footnotes would probably double my already slow reading pace.

I'll just be content to get the gist and to move on :)

One of those "thick missed classic" that I try to wedge into my reading occasionally :)

I saw the musical movie when it came out. Hated it, so only remember a couple basics of the storyline. Loved "Hunchback" when I read it decades ago, so looking forward to this.

If I read 26 pages a day, I'll finish on May 30...my retirement day! :)

"Twice she had been placed in a position of authority second only to God, and both times she had pushed the world into the abyss in the name of love" (535).

"How could Van Gogh have painted such a thing in 1889? Did he, having suffered a second breakdown, truly leap across five centuries and see the sight before them using only his spirit and delirious consciousness?

Or, maybe it was the opposite: He had seen the future, and the sight of this Last Judgment had caused his breakdown and eventual suicide" (529).

"..she knew that, according to string theory, space, like material objects, was made up of many microscopic vibrating strings.

Van Gogh had painted these stings: in his paintings, space--like mountains, wheat fields, houses, and tress--was filled with minute vibrations.

'Starry Night' had left an indelible mark in her, mind, and she was amazed to see it again four centuries later on Pluto" (511)

"..now he thought of (the dunes) as an exposed brain. In the golden dusk, the brain revealed its profusion of grooves and folds...Today, the dusty air managed to let through a bit of long-missed blue, like a mind about to be enlightened" (489).

"There was a saying: If there really were a Creator, the only thing He welded shut in all Creation was the speed of light" (443).

"He was like a piece of nuclear fuel. Even when it was sealed up in a lead container, one could feel its power and threat" (415).

"Ultimately, this last piece of the puzzle could not be deciphered. Like the missing arms of "Venus de Milo", the paintings of Needle-Eye remained mysterious.

But as this detail formed the foundation for all three stories and described an elegant ruthlessness, an exquisite cruelty, and a beautiful death, it must have hinted at a great secret of life and death" (382).

"...I looked for a blip of yellow,
I looked for it above the masses of heads,
a jittering thing, sensitive to the wind as a licked thumb" (148)

--from "The Man with the Yellow Balloon", Matthew Yeager

"You can fall in love
in a museum, but only

with the art
or its silence--or the stranger

you don't mean to follow...

Even the tourists gathered
round the docent, the same

jokes & half-truths
loom beautiful" (153).

--from "Diptych", Kevin Young