In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.
Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.
Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
“Should I do what is necessary?” To my surprise, Julian took both Henry’s hands in his own. “You should only, ever, do what is necessary,” he said.
Donna Tartt, The Secret History [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost … Weh! steck’ ich in dem Kerker noch? Verfluchtes dumpfes Mauerloch, Wo selbst das liebe Himmelslicht Trüb durch gemalte Scheiben bricht! Beschränkt mit diesem Bücherhauf, Den Würme nagen, Staub bedeckt, Den bis ans hohe. … perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all.
Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
“Will you tell the truth now? About Me. My Work. My Becoming. My Art, Mr. Lounds. Is this Art?” “Art.”
Thomas Harris, Red Dragon [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Briefing for a Descent Into Hell [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Doris Lessing.
This novel is beautifully written. I felt like it was very demanding of my attention, because although styles and speakers vary in the course of the text, there are no full page-stop chapter breaks. In the absence of dialogue, paragraphs tend to run for multiple pages, and the prose (sometimes breaking into poetry or incantation) has an insistent restlessness in keeping with its subject matter–especially in the first half, where a narcotized sleep is an ambivalent power for desired healing or feared imprisonment.
“I never learned to live awake. I was trained for sleep. Oh let me sleep and sleep my life away. And if the pressure of true memory wakes me before I need, if the urgency of what I should be doing stabs into my sleep, then for God’s sake doctor, for goodness sake, give me drugs and put me back to dreaming again.” (139)
This waking/sleep dialectic is one of the features that insinuates a mystical subtext throughout. Others include the intimation of people destined for companionship, the foreboding of illusion in consensual phenomena, and reflections on the urge to engender praeterhumanity in our children.
There are many different levels of storytelling involved, of which the outermost is a set of clinical notes and correspondence surrounding the hospitalization of a man with what seems to be traumatic amnesia. Within that setting are conversations, and within those are dreams and memories. In one dream an entire governance of the solar system is set forth as background to the protagonist’s sense of dislocation and urgency. In an unreliable memory, guerrilla warfare becomes the setting for a tragic encounter with idyllic nature.
Others have noted that this is a book worth re-reading, and I’m inclined to agree.
He wondered how much of the insanity of the day—his insanity—had been real, or just induced as a contact lunacy, by the situation.
Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
what particular body I currently occupy is trivia. The important thing is what I am Becoming.
Thomas Harris, Red Dragon [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Graham switched on the lights and bloodstains shouted at him from the walls, from the mattress and the floor. The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room full of dark stains drying.
Thomas Harris, Red Dragon [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Cruelty has a Human Heart, and Jealousy a Human Face, Terror the Human Form Divine, and Secrecy the Human Dress. The Human Dress is forged Iron, The Human Form a fiery Forge, The Human Face a Furnace seal’d, The Human Heart its hungry Gorge.
William Blake, Songs of Experience, quoted in Thomas Harris, Red Dragon [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
There’s something you don’t want me to know about you. Why, there’s something you’re ashamed of. Or is it something you can’t afford for me to know?
Thomas Harris, Red Dragon [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher]