Tuesday, September 20, 2022

To compensate for my lack of ambition

I am inventing, or I am claiming myself as the discoverer of the Lack of Ambition Syndrome. 

  

Monday, September 5, 2022

Still imagining how I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes


Dubliners again. Paper book with the audio companion, the stories come alive with the accents, spirited voices of readers, auditory pleasures that make it more immersive. It's harder to get lost in thought. The equivalent of turning on subtitles when you're watching a movie. 

There's an almost embarrassing element to re-reading stories, especially with the classics. One, you can't remember everything. Two, you just now figure out those epiphanies that you can't believe you missed before, how good the book is at all. And you still won't catch all of them. Three, your own insights will make you laugh at insights you previously held, and your life as a whole. Partly embarrassed by your own epiphany, partly just glad. 

I would have turned out as Duffy in A Painful Case. 

His evenings were spent either before his landlady’s piano or roaming about the outskirts of the city. His liking for Mozart’s music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert: these were the only dissipations of his life.

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting them to the cemetery when they died. He performed these two social duties for old dignity’s sake but conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life. He allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly—an adventureless tale.

His room still bore witness of the orderliness of his mind. Some new pieces of music encumbered the music-stand in the lower room and on his shelves stood two volumes by Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science. He wrote seldom in the sheaf of papers which lay in his desk.

But in my life, love was possible. I live with this great fortune. 

He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.

Re-reading. Bouts of joy and perfectly silent loneliness all over again, with some embarrassment, but with a much better heuristic. It's all good. Nobody will even figure out the name of Mangan's sister.