Currently reading
Sin Titulo
The Old Gringo
Domnei
White Apples
Tarzan of the Apes
The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural)
Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)
The Land of Laughs
Voyage Along the Horizon
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
once again iris murdoch makes my head explode. each time i think i'm in the wrong place when i start: everything seems so conventional and normal, even boring: so british, and calling, and tea cups and all, and then, oh then, it just sort of explodes into sparks of clarity dancing around sordidness combined with philosophy -- its meditations primarily on art, and love. i found several lengthy sections to type out, after the quote below, but cannot now bring myself to do so as the book has exhausted me. it has rung me out but i will not forget it. i do not say i like it, and yet, i cannot say i don't love it. with this, and the unicorn, murdoch has taught me much about suffering, and madness. a quote from the narrator, which perhaps gives credence to those that align bradley pearson with humbert humbert in their minds.
"I felt that I was, at every instant, creating Julian and supporting her being with my own. At the same time I saw her too in every way as I had seen her before. I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious little face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say love is blind. I could even judge her, I could even condemn her, I could even, in some possible galactic loop of thought, make her suffer. But this was still the stuff of paradise because I was a god and I was involved with her in some eternal activity of making to be which was of sole and absolute value. and with her the world was made, nothing was lost, not a grain of sand nor a speck of dust since she was the world and I touched her everywhere."