realization

If I weren't in love with Hemingway, I wouldn't bother with his books.

So we fall in love with ghosts.

I was overwhelmed when I found this on cd in the library. Have devoured it and am seized by the necessity of owning a copy of it, so I can unleash the underlinings I've kept inside myself while listening.

The Magic of Ordinary Days

When I left Mr. Bahri that afternoon, I walked for about forty-five minutes and stopped at my favorite English bookstore. I went in there on a sudden inspiration, fearful that I might not have the opportunity to do so in the near future. And I was right: only a few months later, the Revolutionary Guards raided the bookstore and closed it down. The big iron bolt and chain they installed on a door signified the finality of their action.

I started picking books up with greedy urgency. I went after the paperbacks, collecting almost all the Jameses and all six novels by Austen. I picked up Howard's End and A Room with a View. Then I went after ones I had not read, four novels by Heinrich Boll, and some I had read a long time ago--Vanity Fair and The Adventures of Roderick Random, Humboldt's Gift and Henderson the Rain King. I picked up a bilingual selection of Rilke's poems and Nabokov's Speak, Memory. I even lingered for a while debating over an unexpurgated copy of Fanny Hill. Then I went after the mysteries. I picked up some Dorothy Sayers and, to my utter delight, found Trent's Last Case, two or three new Agatha Christies, a selection of Ross MacDonalds, all of Raymond Chandler and two Dashiell Hammetts.

I didn't have enough money to pay for them all. I took the few I could afford and refused the bookstore owner's very gallant offer to take the rest on credit. As he placed the books I had put on hold in two large paper bags, he smiled with amusement and told me, Don't worry; no one is going to take these away from you. No one knows who they are anymore. Besides, who wants to read them now, at this time?

"Truly landlocked people know they are. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore, and beach because they cannot claim a coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic. Once the people of the lake region discover this, the longing to leave becomes acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless. It might be an appetite for other streets, other slants of light. Or a yearning to hear the solid click of a door behind their backs."



My friend, Emily, brought me this book after she had underlined her favorite bits. I'm reading it whenever I have a moment.

Persuasion

"The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before.

He had, in fact, though his sisters were now doing all they could for him, by calling him "poor Richard," been nothing better than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done anything to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead."

Oh internet, you make sure to amuse me constantly. Today, it was a misquoted line of Whitman's poetry. So fitting, too!


"I celibate and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume."