“I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and […]
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera compares human lives to musical compositions. He writes of two lovers whose “musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them” (89). Kundera contents himself with cataloging a “short dictionary” of words the two lovers […]
“The story we are told of women is not this one. The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one’s own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. […]
“She walked along the southern side aisle, dragging her hand along the wall, feeling the rough texture of the stones, running her fingernails over the shallow grooves made by the stonemason’s toothed chisel. Here in the aisles, under the windows, the wall was decorated with blind arcading, like a row of filled-in arches. The arcading […]
There was a time when I thought Michael V. Hayden and his ilk were scum, but, as Hayden himself acknowledges: “You can only dehumanize an enemy from a distance” (238). Once I let Hayden into my head, he gave my liberal, civilian ass a serious reality check. Despite its nonlinear format and a bevy of […]
“‘Highborn people make poor servants. They are disobedient, resentful, thoughtless, touchy, and they think they’re working hard even though they do less than everyone else––so they cause trouble among the rest of the staff.’ He shrugged. ‘This is my experience.’” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 6638 “We make much in […]
“Hunger is the best seasoning.” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 939 “We don’t have much time. Because our mind predisposes us to think of trends as linear, we often fail to grasp the urgency of the situation. The demand we place on the planet grows, like our economies, not linearly […]
Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening has the look of a graphic novel, but it’s actually a group of interrelated philosophical essays presented in comic book form. This stunning work of art presents a gauntlet of brain-teasers that challenge our assumptions about the nature of human perception and understanding. Sousanis’s central message––that we should learn to see from […]
Two hundred or so pages in, I had high hopes for David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. The novel grabbed me right from the start, showing all the signs of another brilliant yarn from one of the UK’s most talented living authors. Mitchell has a unique gift for inhabiting the minds of different narrators, and for […]
“Are we mutants? Have we evolved this way? Or are we designed? Designed by whom? Why did the designer go to such elaborate lengths, only to vacate the stage and leave us wondering why we exist? For entertainment? For perversity? For a joke? To judge us?” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 405