Tag: book passages

Book Passage of the Week (2/28/2016) – from The Alchemist

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The Alchemist is one of my favorite books. I read it my senior year of college, right after France decided they didn’t want me as a teacher and a few months before China did.

I’ve read it several times since then. I underlined a lot of passages, took a lot of notes. What you see below is just one of many:

“Well, why don’t you go to Mecca now?” asked the boy.

“Because it’s the thought of Mecca that keeps me alive. That’s what helps me face these days that are all the same, these mute crystals on the shelves, and lunch and dinner at that same horrible café. I’m afraid that if my dream is realized, I’ll have no reason to go on living.

“You dream about your sheep and the Pyramids, but you’re different from me, because you want to realize your dreams. I just want to dream about Mecca. I’ve already imagined it a thousand times crossing the desert, arriving at the Plaza of the Sacred Stone, the seven times I walk around it before allowing myself to touch it. I’ve already imagined the people who would be at my side, and those in front of me, and the conversations and prayers we would share. But I’m afraid that it would all be a disappointment, so I prefer just to dream about it.”

The plot of The Alchemist borrows from the folk tale “The Man Who Became Rich Again Through a Dream“, which itself has many variations throughout the world, such as Pedlar of Swaffham.

And the passage above reminds me of the following exchange from Collateral, a very underrated movie:

Vincent: Look in the mirror. Paper towels, clean cab. Limo company some day. How much you got saved?

Max: That ain’t any of your business.

Vincent: Someday? Someday my dream will come? One night you will wake up and discover it never happened. It’s all turned around on you. It never will. Suddenly you are old. Didn’t happen, and it never will, because you were never going to do it anyway. You’ll push it into memory and then zone out in your barco lounger, being hypnotized by daytime TV for the rest of your life. Don’t you talk to me about murder. All it ever took was a down payment on a Lincoln town car. That girl, you can’t even call that girl. What the fuck are you still doing driving a cab?

Guy gets on the subway and dies. Think anybody’ll notice?

 

Book Passage of the Week (2/15/2016) – from In the Country of Desire, by Leslie Garrett

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I just finished In the Country of Desire, by Leslie Garrett.

This, and Beasts, his other book, are both out of print. They’re easy to come by — I grabbed a used copy off Thriftbooks — while information on Leslie Garrett is not so easy to come by. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. He was a contemporary of Cormac McCarthy, and the best I could find was this page:

As my friend Leslie Garrett lay dying of cancer that clutched him by the throat, news came that his old comrade and competitor, Cormac McCarthy, had just realized his greatest professional triumph–winning the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses. The award catapulted McCarthy to the front ranks of American letters. Less last book, In the Country of Desire, meanwhile, was dying like its author–a slow, painful wasting in obscurity.

I’ll cut to the chase: I didn’t enjoy the book. It was fairly well written, but I didn’t care about the people  that much. I do plan on checking out Leslie Garrett’s first novel, Beasts.

Here’s a couple passages that stuck with me:

There is a street in the city dedicated to lonely men. It serves not the ordinary loneliness of ordinary men, which is wistful and longing, but that loneliness which deadens the spirit and makes the mind and body scream. And yet these are the quietest of men.

And:

Willa had asked where God lived, and her grandmother had told her that he lived so far up in the sky that no one could see him. Later Willa went to the woods and climbed as far up in a tree as she could go and searched the sky for hours, but she could not see God. Now she thought that perhaps, in her own way, that was what her mother had been searching for too: the face of God that no one ever sees.

An average book despite some nice writing. Worth checking out if you’re into obscure books.

Missing Hong Kong Booksellers + Book Passage of the Week (1/9/2016) – from The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

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HK booksellers have gone missing, if you haven’t heard the news. One of them was a British citizen, so the CCP is now kidnapping citizens of other countries for publishing books they don’t want you to read.

And don’t doubt for a second they’re behind it. You can’t put anything past the mainland regime. When you operate the strictest internet censorship in the world and require companies to turn over customer data as a condition to do business in their country…yeah, it’s not a stretch at all.

The appropriate response would be to disseminate these books as widely as possible. Far as I know, the book is about Xi Jiping’s alleged mistress. If I had more power, I’d do everything I could to not only publish it but make it as widely read as possible: every language, every country. Fuck your hurt feelings.

As it stands, I’m here, blogging about it. If you want to help, spread the word. Sign the petition. Don’t let them get away with this shit. You think this just stays in Hong Kong? Wake up. It sets a horrible precedent all over the globe.

This passage is from The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. He’s the guy who helped get Confederacy of Dunces published, which is how I knew about him and ended up reading The Moviegoer:

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.

It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but—” or “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However—” and I think to myself: this is death.

I felt the same way the other day at work, when people had a length discussion about whether Caitlyn Jenner still has a penis, and does this make him a man or a woman? I can’t even pretend to care about this shit.

 

Book Passage of the Week (1/2/2016) – from George Orwell

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Animal Farm was required reading in 9th grade English. I read 1984 several years later, but only recently have I dove into Orwell’s nonfiction.

Today’s rather short passage comes from the essay Such, Such Were the Joys, collected here.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

The essay is about Orwell’s experiences at a prep school. Besides life at an English prep school in the early twentieth century, it delves into class conflict, the effects of (and reasons for) corporal punishment, psychological abuse … and the authority figures who frightened you as a child:

What should I think of Bingo and Sim, those terrible, all-powerful monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse. I would be no more frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormouse.

A good read. Check it out.

 

Book Passage of the Week (12/19/2015) – from Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth

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About a year ago I read Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth, by James M. Tabor. It tracks the efforts of two teams, one led by American Bill Stone to the Cheve Cave system in southern Mexico and the other, led by Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk to the Kurbera supercave in the country Georgia.

Exploring caves is dangerous. It seems obvious, but Blind Descent opens it up in ways you wouldn’t imagine, from diseases to sound amplification (imagine sleeping next to a roaring 747 for months at a time) to The Rapture, an anxiety attack brought on by prolonged periods in darkness.

And by darkness, I mean complete darkness. Sometimes in spaces so tight you can barely wriggle through. All your light runs on batteries, and all your equipment must be protected.

You also have to deal with sumps, flooded underground tunnels which carry the risk of getting lost, damaging your equipment

And drowning:

Drowning is a cruel way to go. It throws two of the body’s most potent self-preservation reflexes into competition. Trapped underwater, you hold your breath as long as possible, with the urge to breathe growing from a whisper in your chest to a scream in your brain. As the carbon dioxide in your bloodstream builds up, you start to jerk and spasm. Gray fog closes down your peripheral vision. With your vision down to points of light, your fists clenched and toes curled as if in orgasm, your mouth opens not to scream but to inhale involuntarily. Finally, your lungs fill and you become negatively buoyant, floating slowly down, staring at eternity. There may be no good ways to die, but some are worse than others.

All in all, the book is great. Here’s a great interview with James Tabor about supercave exploration and be sure to check out this article about the Krubera Cave and the deepest point on earth, “Game Over”.