Passages I loved from books I read this year, part 2
In the last newsletter I promised a second round of passages. These are in no particular order — just lines and paragraphs that stood out to me from novels I read in 2021. Many of these I wrote about during the year, in which case I’ve linked to the original post. But no new insights to offer today, I’m afraid — just the words of others.
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From The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes:
Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire — and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company you may muster, can only be faced alone. But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records — in words, sound, pictures — you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
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From Party Going, by Henry Green:
Max came back to be with them, unseeing. Now that he had heard Amabel and that he knew she was in her bath undressed, it seemed to him that when they had been together she had warmed him every side. When he opened his eyes close beside her in the flat she had blotted out the light, only where her eye would be he could see dazzle, all the rest of her mountain face had been that dark acreage against him. He had lain in the shadow of it under softly beaten wings of her breathing, and his thoughts, hatching up out of sleep, had bundled back into the other darkness of her plumes. So being entirely delivered over he had lain still, he remembered, because he had been told by that dazzle her eyelids were not down so that she lay still awake.
He wanted her.
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From The Love Affair as a Work of Art, Dan Hofstadter (he’s writing here about Juliette Recamier, a famous French beauty of the Napoleonic era:
Consider, for a moment, Juliette’s early life: how, barely out of her convent, she had been given away at sixteen to a man of forty-two; how she had passed through a licentious age without losing a feather from her wing; and how, with no authority but that of her astonishing appearance, she had engaged to make Beauty what everybody from the Renaissance onward had implicitly expected it to be: the incarnate face of Goodness. With Beauty alone she had bravely opposed Napoleon; with Beauty alone she had gone into exile with Germaine de Staël. Yet if one must admire her courage in the face of tyranny, one may also question whether in the matter of her stubbornly guarded reputation she had acted of her own free will or as a sort of moral automaton, teleguided by forces beyond her control. In many ways she seems a propitiatory creature, a being into whose limbs a polluted society projected, as though by sympathetic magic, its desperate need for virtue and purity. It was as though people believed, in that age when so many parties were stained with blood, that republican piety could somehow be kept alive if just one person remained uncorrupted.
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From Proust’s The Prisoner — I’m going to include a few paragraphs here. This one, about when we suddenly find ourselves shunned by people we respect:
The disgraced ambassador, the civil service chief forced into retirement, the man about town given a chilly reception, the lover shown the door sometimes spend months examining the event which destroyed their hopes; they turn it over and over like a bullet fired they do not know from where nor by whom, almost like a meteorite. They want to know what the strange device is made of that struck them down so suddenly, whose ill-will it embodies. At least chemists can turn to analysis; sufferers from an unknown disease can call in a doctor. And criminal cases are more or less clarified by the examining magistrate. But the disconcerting actions of our fellow men rarely reveal their motives.
About the compulsion to say things we know will get a reaction:
Even if Madame Verdurin had decided, after reflection, that it would be wiser to postpone the revelations to be made to Morel, it was now too late to turn back. We can allow certain desires, sometimes purely oral in nature, to become so strong that they must be satisfied whatever the consequences: we simply must plant a kiss on a bare shoulder that we have been looking at for too long, and our lips fall on it like a bird of prey on a snake; we cannot resist the impulse, stronger than hunger, to sink our teeth in a cake; or forego the astonishment, the alarm, the sorrow or the gaiety which we can unleash in a human soul by saying something unexpected. In this frame of mind, drunk on melodrama, Mme Verdurin had impressed on her husband that he must take the violinist on one side and, at all costs, speak to him.
About how great art can make life seem worth living:
As if from the illegible notebooks where a chemist of genius, not knowing death is at hand, has written down discoveries which will perhaps remain for ever unread, she had extracted from papers more illegible than papyri marked with cuneiform script, the ever-true, ever-fertile formula for that unknown joy, that mystic hope of the scarlet angel of morning… [I] owed to her, in compensation, the possibility of receiving the strange call which had come to me and which I would never again cease to hear — as it were the promise that something else existed, something perhaps reachable through art, besides the nothingness that I had found in all pleasures, and even in love, and that even if my life seemed so empty, at least it was not over.
About how art and music can convey the uncommunicable:
But is it not the case that these elements, this final residue which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which speech cannot convey even from friend to friend, from master to pupil, from lover to mistress, that this inexpressible thing which reveals the qualitative difference between what each of us has felt and has had to leave on the threshold of the phrases which he uses to communicate with others, something which he can do only by dwelling on points of experience common to all and consequently of no interest to any, can be expressed through art, the art of a Vinteuil or an Elstir, which makes manifest in the colors of the spectrum the intimate makeup of those worlds we call individuals, and which without art we should never know? Wings, another respiratory system which allowed us to cross the immensity of space, would not help us. For if we went to Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, everything we might see there would take on the same aspect as the things we know on Earth. The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not toward new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see, or can be; and we can do that with the help of an Elstir, a Vinteuil; with them and their like we can truly fly from star to star.
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From “A Place in the Country”, a short story included in a collection of stories by Shirley Hazzard. A conversation at the end of an unhappy affair:
After a pause, he said abruptly: “I think I told you I no longer loved my wife.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I only said that once, didn’t I?”
“Several times,” she answered, unaccommodatingly.
“Several times, then,” he agreed, with a touch of impatience. “In any case — I see now that I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, that it wasn’t true.”
She thought that the digressions in the minds of men were endless. How many disguises were assumed before they could face themselves. How many justifications made in order that they might simply please themselves. How dangerous they were in their self-righteousness — infinitely more dangerous than women, who could never persuade themselves to the same degree of the nobility of their actions.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked her.
“Men,” she said absently.
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From Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, about the apartment building full of down-at-heel artists where she lived:
I knew well those in the old furnished rooms up around Columbia. They had about them a left-over, dim, vanquished aspect, depressed spirits living in a conquered territory. The discontent of the people at the hotel Schuyler was quite different. Most of them were failures, but they lived elevated by unreal hopes, ill-considered plans. They drank, they fought, they fornicated. They ran up bills, they lied and fought confusion with mild debaucheries. They were not poverty-stricken, just always a little “behind.” Undomestic, restless, unreliable, changeable, disloyal. They were not spinsters, but divorcees. They were not bachelors, but seedy bon vivants, deserters from family life, alimony, child support, from loans long erased from memory. They drank for three days and sobered for three. People with union cards — acrobats, ballroom teams. The act was presented terrible, they would say about the current bill at Radio City Music Hall.
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From In a Lonely Place, by Megan Abbott. Dix is full of resentment for the rich uncle who won’t give him money:
He crumpled the letter into a tight angry ball and hurled it across the room. He didn’t even finish reading it, he knew too well the pious platitudes about work and pay, he’d heard them all his life. When other fellows had cars and clothes and free spending, he had platitudes. It wasn’t that the old skinflint didn’t have it. There was plenty of money for stocks and bonds, real estate. Everything salted away for an old man’s idea of being a solid citizen. You’d think Uncle Fergus would have recognized the need for things that made living worth living. He’d been a poor clod, son of a dirt farmer. He’d never had anything either, starting to work in a Princeton hardware store when he was fourteen (how well Dickson knew every step of Uncle Fergus’s meager life; he could recite it like a nursery rhyme), studying nights to get himself into the university. Dickson could see him, one of those poor boobs, peasants, owning one dark, ill-fitting suit and a pair of heavy-soled shoes, clumping to class, study, and work, and nobody knew that he was in Princeton but the other peasants. Not even coming out of it cum laude, the needed touch for a big success story. Nothing, just grubbing through, worrying along to graduation; getting nothing but a diploma and a fixed belief that to be a Princeton man was like being a senator or maybe Jehovah.
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From Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith, where murderer Bruno reflects on that one great violent night of his life:
Bruno opened his eyes tentatively. He felt deliciously heavy with sleep. He saw himself halfway across the room, as if he watched himself on a screen. He was in his red-brown suit. It was the island in Metcalf. He saw his younger, slimmer body arc toward Miriam and fling her to the earth, those few short moments separate from time before and time after. He felt he had made special movements, thought special brilliant thoughts in those moments, and that such an interval would never come again. Like Guy had talked about himself, the other day on the boat, when he built the Palmyra. Bruno was glad those special moments for both of them had come so near the same time. Sometimes he thought he could die without regrets, because what else could he ever do that would measure up to the night in Metcalf? What else wouldn’t be an anticlimax? Sometimes, like now, he felt his energy might be winding down, and something, maybe his curiosity, dying down. But he didn’t mind, because he felt so wise now somehow, and really so content. Only yesterday he had wanted to go around the world. And why? To say he had been? To say to whom? Last month he had written to William Beebe, volunteering to go down in the new super-bathysphere that they were testing first without a man inside. Why? Everything was silly compared to the night in Metcalf.
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And finally, Natalia Ginzburg again, writing about the horrors of English food in an essay titled “La Maison Volpé” in the collection The Little Virtues:
But despite all this fuss, which is made about food, for the English it remains simply ‘food’, which is a sad, generalized thing. In novels you read that ‘some food’ was brought, no affectionate or specific description is given. The thousands of tins stacked up in the groceries carry pictures of the most various and mouthwatering animals — pheasants, partridges, different kinds of deer, and they are stamped with the enticing names of distant countries which it would be marvellous to visit. But anyone who has been here for some time is unimpressed, he knows very well that the contents of these tins are ‘food’, which is to say nothing. Nothing that could be eaten with enjoyment and a quiet mind anyway.
After you have lived here for a while you realize that you have to be careful when buying food. You cannot go into a cake-shop, choose a few cakes and then take them home and eat them. This simple, innocent act is out of the question here. Because those cakes — so prettily covered in chocolate and dotted with almonds — are, when you eat them, like a paste made of coal-dust or sand. I should, out of fairness, add that they are perfectly harmless. They are only horrible, innocuous but horrible, with the staleness of hundreds of years, but innocuous. The cakes placed next to the mummies in the tombs of the Pharaohs must have the same taste. And you cannot buy sweets with an easy mind either. They can be as hard as rocks; they can stick to the teeth and fill your mouth with a peculiar taste of salt.