Lindsey Memory > Recent Status Updates

6.5 hours in and only 29% done, phew this is a slog. Good thing it’s so meaty and well-written! I was shocked but kind of respect that he says, “most of Western culture is shaped by Christianity,” then he doesn’t actually recount Jesus’s story. Just jumps into sketching the Greek/Latin culture that immediately preceded Christ and then starts cataloging all the political/cultural changes that followed.

Let’s do this 😎

Really struggling with this one (I think this is the tenth Sanderson book I’ve read?). His “formula” shows through more in this book. Doesn’t help that yhe plot moves forward only about an inch every fifty pages or so.

“At home in bed a few weeks before he died, I asked him, ‘Can you breathe ok with my head in your chest like this?’ His answer was, ‘It’s the only way I know how to breather.’ That Paul and I formed part of the deep meaning of each other’s lives is one of the greatest blessings that has ever come to me.” 😦😭💙

“(to his baby daughter 😭) when you come to a moment in life where you must give an account of yourself, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”

“from the enlightenment onward, the individual occupied center stage. But now I lived in a different world, a more ancient one, where human action piled against superhuman forces, a world that was more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare. What I had come for was not a treatment plan – I had read enough to know the medical way forward – but the comfort of oracular wisdom.”

“yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands, and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. Science is based on reproduceability and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique & subjective & unpredictable.”

“I spent a good chunk of my 20s trying to build a frame for an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics minus outmoded concepts like souls and God. The problem eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning.”

“We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked and yet still struggle to win for your patients.”

“The standard statistic, the Kaplan-Meier curve, measures the number of patients surviving over time. It is the metric by which we gauge progress, by which we understand the ferocity of a disease. The problem is that you cannot tell an individual patient where she sits on the curve: Will she die in six months or sixty?”

“In these moments I acted not as death’s enemy but its ambassador. I had to help those families understand that the person they knew- the full, vital, independent human- now lived only in the past and that I needed their input to understand what sort of future he or she would want: an easy death or to be strung between bags of fluids going in and out, to persist despite being unable to struggle.”

“I don’t believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sun of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”

A little bored… we get it, all rich white men are overbearing, prideful, entitled jerks and all country folk are morally superior. So many stereotypes, not enough murder solving.

The 8 worldwide sources of awe

Moral beauty or strength in others
Collective effervescence
Nature and natural phenomenon
Music
Visual designs
Spiritual and religious are
Stories of life or death
Epiphany, or a sudden understanding about an essential truth of life

Dang it I can tell I’m going to hate the audiobook format for this book. This is the kind of thing I want to write down quotes from!

Definition: awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.

Vastness can be physical, temporal, or semantic/cognitive.

Oh no, this is going to be really sad, isn’t it?

I’ve been waiting for this to become available as an audiobook in Libby for months! Jesse’s one of my favorite journalists. His stalwart exposure of the replication crisis in the social sciences is so smart, and thorough, and interesting. Makes you really see the limits to human scientific endeavor, but in a hopeful way. We deserve, and should demand, better.

I’M SO EXCITED!

If you have brothers and ever read this, call me when you get to the 75% mark (you’ll know when you need to call me). You can sob into the phone to me, it’s ok. I’ll understand.

I am not ok rn 😭 these Bryan brothers…

Hilary Mantel is a goddess of a writer. The first book in this series, Wolf Hall, deserved its spot in the NYT Top 10 books for the last 25 years, and so far this book is a worthy follow-up to the first.

The worst thing about paranoia is that the only way to prove you’re not paranoid is to find out you’re right.

Hm a very small, very tough Scandinavian woman named Elizabeth with world-level talent, brusque manners, disdain for social convention, and a semi-humble quip that “I’m not good with people”: where have I seen this protagonist before? Stieg Larsson would be flattered at the resemblance to Lisbeth Salander if he were still alive.

Hiraeth: a welsh word Burton translated as, “a longing for unnameable things”

Man, being alive before the 1900s just SUCKED, these poor devils. Also, maritime history is one of my all-time favorite historical topics. This book is steeped in quotes from primary sources and I am loving it!

“Perhaps more than any aspect of our lives other than eating, housework is repeated every single day. Repeated activity has the most to teach us because we have to face it time after time. Through the daily nature of housework, we confront our personal thinking errors.”

We took a seven-year leap in time and the pace slowed way down and I’m just bummed that things still aren’t breaking Jack or Philip’s way… I feel like Philip’s character has become more obscure this latter half of the book. The wedge between him and Aliena is interesting but doesn’t feel super realistic. Not sure where he’s meant to end up, but I hope he has more arc coming.

This story gets better and better and more devastating, infuriating, and endearing every chapter. I am never going to sleep tonight…

The death of William BETTER BE SAVAGE, ugh he is the worst bad guy in ages. BOOOOO.

I have never wanted illustrations and diagrams so badly in my life. He’s describing in intricate detail a priory— little monk haven in the twelfth century—and a cathedral. I have no idea what all these architectural words mean.

Is this a YA book? I was unaware. It feels written at the YA level. I don’t care for YA fiction, but I’m working to stay with it, because I appreciate the world-building. I’m already sick of the not one but two handsome young men who clench their jaws a lot around our young protagonist…