Review
Solnit's writing is never less than entrancing. Here we enter into her sense of loss as her mother's faculties fail and Solnit is led to a reverie on memory, pain, and the bittersweet thoughts inspired by three boxes of apricots.
Notes
- p.26
(of her mother) "told her own story" ... as ... "things that happened to her rather than things she did"
- p.27
Ana Teresa Fernandez & the ice stilettos
- p.30/31
love of places - they never love us back - but they do give continuity, familiarity (me) not so unlike family? also is the security of places in their uncaring and unchaining nature - c.f. idea of God as beyond emotion & love???
- p.34
(on carpe dieum) "Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren't done"
- p.46
vampyre stories (as well as Frankenstien) start in the same volcano dark, damp summer challenge of Byron
- p.46/47
footer "there should be a story ... whereby a god becomes a human for love" (there is!)
- p.60
Easter Island, the bird man cult & the god MakeMake
- p.63
"a book isa heart that only beats in the chest of another"
- p.64
writing - "conversation with the absent" "the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk" c.f. writing as third order experience
- p.68
Iceland "the back of the north wind"
- p.69
'die ex machine' - not well regarded "The ancient critics felt that events should unfold from the acts and character of the central figures, not form outside forces"
- p.72
in the bones 'hematopoiesis' from 'poiesis' - to make - lie chars, houses and words
- p 100/101
amazing history of Che Guevara - worked @ leprosy hospitals, seer asthma - book (and film) The Motorcycle Diaries
- p.102
"I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease" more important than "being a famous researcher" .. "was helping those people" (quote from The Motorcycle Diaries)
- p.106
leprosy - pain/sensation free limbs "don't feel part of me", "They are like tools", "they are dead"
- p.107
"If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless"
