Quotes

It’s been a long time.

I came here today because I’ve been thinking about the ways in which we process art. Some things you get immediately–others become brilliant through time. And with time, some things get less brilliant.

Things that were brilliant at first sight: Faulkner, PKD, Munro, Pynchon. Most of my favored authors are ones that needed no marination time. But lately I’ve been finding myself somehow going back to Bolano–much more than I thought I would have, when I was reading it. Whatever it was that grabbed me about 2666 was very different from the immediate … attraction … that I felt when I moved on to Faulkner. How to describe the difference? It’s like with Faulkner, the brilliance was there at first sight. I may not always understand the specifics of what he is writing, but somehow the emotions of it all are right there. That long passage in the bear–who is speaking? I had no idea, half the time. But I was still carried along, and I knew that I was feeling what Faulkner had intended me to feel. What was so different about Bolano or Mitchell? 2666 and cloud atlas in particular are two books that I was not initially impressed with that I keep returning to. It’s like the emotional content of Bolano’s words took a while to sink in. 

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity. 261

I somehow appreciate this quote more each time I look at it.

I suppose I’m interested in understanding this because I remember wondering what the big deal was about Bolano after I read savage detectives. I started reading 2666 because I wanted to figure out his appeal. And I don’t even know if I can explain it now that I’ve read him and love him. There is something urgent and yet calm about the way his sentences go–the first quotation is all about contrasts and transformation into opposites. The squeezing of universal truths and experiences into the truths and experiences of one man, this individual. 

If it were possible to convey what one feels when night falls and the stars come out and one is alone in the vastness, and life’s truths (night truths) begin to march past one by one, somehow swooning or as if the person out in the open were swooning or as if a strange sickness were circulating in the blood unnoticed.  593

This quote reminds me of Flaubert:

…as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows, for human speech is like a cracked kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make the bears dance when we long to touch the stars to tears.

On the surface, they are about two very different things–but something about the impulse behind it–the impulse to express, the impulse to translate feelings into words, the desire to create experiences in common, to be understood by others–is the same. The limits of human expression, the way art is this thing that may arise out of oneself but is ultimately an impulse to connect with others.

Thinking about all this always gets me thinking about the purpose of my site. I have many things on my quotes site that no longer appeal to me the way they used to. Many of these were authors from high school, when I was just discovering literature. When I see them, I often wonder whether I should get rid of them. This most often happens to me on the Alice Munro page. There are a bunch of quotes that, for whatever reason, don’t strike me–yet I can’t bring myself to delete them. This is the twofold nature of my quote archive–it is both a resource and a record. If I were to pare down those things that no longer speak to me, would that make my site a better resource? But those passages spoke to me once, and even when I no longer feel the same way about a particular quote, I can always remember why I liked it before. So on one level, this archive is a compendium of my emotional history, but it’s also a way of sharing things that are meaningful to me with others. Using the words of others to try to convey the unspeakable.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach. 350

In a way, I think that is why I like both my quote archive (my CSS site) and the wordpress blog. It might be redundant, but the blog records when I read these books. You can almost start from the beginning and look at the evolution of a narrative. There is a beginning and a progression. So at one point, I was clearly reading a lot of books on a given topic. My quote archive is flat–there’s no sense of history there, not in the same way. And I like seeing it like that as well. Categorizing everything, watching the list of authors grow, seeing who I click on more and less. My access to the quotes on my site is equalized–I am not more prone to click on one or the other more just because it was more recent and therefore further up the blogroll. And so it is more of a resource, while the blog is more of a compendium. I like having both.