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âThere is a moment of dumb dismay, and the wanderings must begin again; the painful explaining away of facts, the feverish raking up of illusions, the cultivation of a fresh crop of lies in the sweat of oneâs brow, to sustain life, to make it supportable, to make it fair, so as to hand intact to another generation of blind wanderers the charming legend of a heartless country, of a promised land, all flowers and blessingsâŠâ
Itâs from The Return - Joseph Conrad. Iâm still a hard line natalist⊠but just barely
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I read this novella all in one sitting on the train to Bath, and I haven't been able to stop thing about it. Set in the 1920s, the main character is shellshocked WWI veteran who ventures into the British countryside to restore a mural in an old church. But it feels like more than an anti war novel, its about the end of summer, the passage of time and modernity, finding your place in a changing world. A Month in the Country is a celebration of brokenness â not the suffering of brokenness but, rather, the vulnerability that brokenness brings.
âWe can ask and ask but we canât have again what once seemed ours for ever â the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. Theyâve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.
All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.â
Mar 18, 2025
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on page 248 of the edition i have, i stumbled across this line and it has stayed with me ever since
"Truth, she thought. As terrible as death, but harder to find"
Mar 30, 2025
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the endings of great novels stay with you. a momentous rush that last dot, words and eyes speeding towards it almost with reluctance, until yes that world is done but something ripples out, a faint radiance or shadow, like the dark spot that lingers in your eye long after staring at the sun.
this i felt reading:Â
âportrait of a lady by henry james
âswannâs way by proust
âthe red and the black by stendhal
âulysses by joyce
âthe sun also rises by hemingway
Jan 30, 2024
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one of the many american foods perfected in the 1960s. once someone at my work caught the toaster on fire trying to toast one of these, Iâm not sure what went wrong but I wish they had burned the building down
Jan 22, 2025
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feeling depressed insomniac constipated nauseous? you can always buy a supplement about it. does it have a name like a russian spacecraft? was it harvested in the gobi desert? good signs. you might be missing a precious amino and you donât even know. I havenât found the little pill thatâll fix me *yet* but when I do youâll all be sorry
May 15, 2024