Recalls dark, fearful waiting, p 14 "...objects washed into each other during the agonizing wait, the pans by the wall coming to life along with the icons and it even seemed there was someone in the bed. They hoped to escape these hallucinatory visions by stealing glances at one another.." (3/3) 💙
"No, it is a person after all. Could it be that old bat by the toilets? Or that asshole over there in the gym shoes? What is this? Some kind of dissent?" Then it suddenly stops. Now there's only the silence, the suspicious glances." (2/3)
Confused, fearful, and unstable #satantangotogether p38: "Irimiás raises his glass then then slowly puts it down again. 'Is someone humming here?' he mutters in irritation. "Is someone making a joke?! What the hell is it? A machine? Or, or might it be...the lamps?..." 1/3
💙 #satantangotogether
Thank you! Yes, especially love the majestic, effervescent, dramatic and wide ranging world of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2! also No. 11, which seems to fit better the mood of these first pages of #Satantangotogether...
& more noir, sur-reality, captain "replaced by a new nose, new bones, new wrinkles that wipe away all memory...to preserve in a single mass everything which, years from now, will find itself interred six feet under." echoes p12, death motif, Futaki's deathly reflection of his face in a window. 🖤
More strangeness, e.g. Irimiás "loping," Petrina, "like a snake." & wildly, captain appears: "as if he were covered in armor;... swallowing light, some secret power is entering his skin; the decay resurrected from the cavity of the bones, liberated, is filling every cell of his body..." p 36
"People are satisfied. That's just how it should be. But if they read the papers properly they would know that there is a real crisis out there. We are not going to allow that crisis to hem us in and destroy all we have achieved!" Seems captain will oppress, obfuscate... (2/2) #Satantangotogether
Still going in circles, the captain relents first: "I've had enough of the Irimiás-Petrina duo. I am fed up with creatures like you, miserable dogs who think I am answerable to them!" And Irimiás "Captain, you know us. Why can't things remain as they were?" What was that? (1/2) p 35
Also, NB: ominous "door Number Twenty-Four"... opening of chapter 2 is very elliptical; have no idea what "the shadow of suspicion is about"... though the matter is characterized as a "ridiculous misunderstanding.." p 21 #satantangotogether
arrive at an absurd, hilarious, confused state of affairs when captain questions Petrina and Irimias -- "How did you get here!? Have you any idea what this office deals with?!" Both men shake their heads feeling weak. "This is the RP Section--Registry of Prostitutes..." p 28 #satantangotogether
Then Mrs. Halics comes to the door reporting to Mrs. Schmidt that Irimias and Petrina, who have been dead 18 months, were on their way to the estate... The account is confused, perhaps some unnamed "kid" simply lied. Mr. Schmidt thinks this is a trap, and Futaki believes Irimias is a magician. (2/2)
Madness? e.g. p 13 ..."suddenly a vague form appeared at the window...a human face.." And Futaki realizes this is his own face; "what the rain was doing to his face was exactly what time would do. It would wash it away." And then remembered "the bells tolling at dawn..." (1/2) #Satantangotogether
"...and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away, only, eventually, to deliver himself-- utterly naked, without identifying mark... " see p 4 for con't of passage anticipating book's plunge into the human condition. #Satantango 🖤(4/4)
"a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity..." Right at the outset, this introduces urgency, dark pov driving the book, which leads into iconography, image of coffin... (3/4)
Also, no paragraph or line breaks -- one long sequence. Then we get this leap on p 4 "suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater space of eternity..." (2/4)
Opening sentence includes foreshadowing, whispering a secret "(later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impossible and put the town too beyond reach)." And then sounds of bells, eg, pg 3 "Futaki woke to hear bells..."now ever fainter bell sound... then p 5 "ghostly bells." (1/4)
“downed like a rooster, his wings hanging miserably in the battle. It really is a god who can, at one sight of his loveliness, break our courage this way and force down our pride do thoroughly…” He toyed and skirmished with his emotions, far too haughty to be afraid of them.” #DeathinVenice 💙
of dissolution and weakness. He was embarrassed, as he feared that someone or other, if only the guard on the beach, must have observed his pursuit and defeat. He was very much afraid of the ridiculous. Further, he joked with himself about his comically pious distress. “Downed,” he thought (2/3)
“Aschenbach was no longer given to self-criticism. His tastes, the mental caliber of his years, his self-respect, ripeness, and a belated simplicity made him unwilling to dismember his motives and to debate whether his impulses were the result of conscientiousness or... (1/3) #DeathinVenice #TMann💙
Moved by this gorgeous poem by Wendell Berry🩵"...I come into the peace of wild things..." Thank you @ddgmns💙https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/peace-wild-things-0/
“I too still wept when I became once again for a moment the former friend of Albertine. But it was into a new personality that I was tending to change altogether. It is not because other people are dead that our affections for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying.” p805Proust#TheFugitive
preferred mere assertions by Albertine. Why had I believed them? Lying is essential to humanity.…One lies all one’s life long,even, especially,perhaps only, to those who love one. For they alone make us fear for our pleasure and [make us] desire their esteem.” p 824 #Proust #TheFugitive
“It is desire that engenders belief, and if we are not as a rule aware of this, it is because most belief creating desires—unlike the desire that persuaded me that Albertine was innocent—end only with our own life. To all the evidence that corroborated my original version, I had stupidly (1/2)
“Our mistake lies in supposing that things present themselves as they really are, names as they are written, people as photography and psychology give an unalterable notion of them. But in reality this is not at all what we ordinarily perceive…” p774 #Proust #TheFugitive
“But all the reflexes of desire, of anxiety, of the mortal blow struck by the fear of not seeing her if my father took me away,all these things, associated with an image of which I knew nothing..was enough that I knew it to be agreeable, already constituted a state of love.”p764 #Proust #TheFugitive
“And now, aware that..one element after another of my love was vanishing, the jealous side of it, then drifting gradually back in a vague remembrance to the tentative beginnings, it was my love..in the scattered notes of the little phrase, I seemed to see disintegrating before my eyes.” p756 #Proust
“It had been struck most of all by the elaboration, the trial runs, the repetitions, the gradual evolution of a phrase which developed through the course of the sonata as that love had developed through the course of my life.” p755 #Proust #TheFugitive
“In the Bois, I hummed phrases of Vinteuil’s sonata…that Albertine had..played it to me no longer saddened me unduly,..my memories of her had entered into that secondary chemical state..no longer cause of an anxious oppression of the heart, but rather a certain sweetness.” p755 #Proust #TheFugitive
“Then I was no longer alone; I felt the barrier that separated us vanish..True, I still wanted to speak to her about the story of the laundry-girl, but no longer in order to score a cruel triumph... I asked her tenderly, as I should have asked her had she been alive…” p714 #Proust #TheFugitive 💙
