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peytonaaa's Reviews (927)
emotional
reflective
"'You are already away from me,' he said as if he could hear the future whining, as if he could see the future pulling at her hand. He watched her, he looked at her more than she looked at him."
dark
reflective
"It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist’s inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence."
man[n]...
man[n]...
mysterious
reflective
"Your bridge will remain; maybe it will take on, as time passes, a very different meaning from the one it has today, just as in my vanished country they'l see something quite different from what it actually was, our successors will hang their stories on it, their worlds, their desires. Nothing belongs to us. They will find beauty in terrible battles, courage in men's cowardliness, everything will enter into legend."
Giving out so many 9s and 10s lately
Giving out so many 9s and 10s lately
emotional
reflective
"There is something disturbing in the air here. I can feel it. It’s as if the buildings know the story I’m telling and the landscape falls mute at the memory of it, in an attempt to make room for what our eyes can’t see, for what is seemingly no longer here."
emotional
reflective
"From time to time, in an encounter or an omen, or in a particular series of happenings, I think that I recognize the working of fate, but too many paths lead nowhere at all, and too many sums add up to nothing. To be sure, I perceive in this diversity and disorder the presence of a person; but his form seems nearly always to be shaped by the pressure of circumstances; his features are blurred, like a face reflected in water. I am not of those who say that their actions bear no resemblance to them. Indeed, actions must do so, since they alone give my measure, and are the sole means of engraving me upon the memory of men, or even upon my own memory (and since perhaps the very possibility of continuing to express and modify oneself by action may constitute the real difference between the state of the living and of the dead). But there is between me and these acts which compose me an indefinable hiatus, and the proof of this separation is that I feel constantly the necessity of weighing and explaining what I do, and of giving account of it to myself."
funny
reflective
I truly enjoyed the multiple afterwords but it's also pretty funny that nyrb published Ramanujan's translation accompanied by an interview w the author complaining about that translation
"The desire natural to mere mortals, to tell lies, to hide things, to think of one's own welfare, arose in him for the first time. He couldn't find the courage to shatter the respect and faith these people had placed in him. Is this pity, self-preservation, habit, inertia, sheer hypocrisy? The Sanskrit chant, learned by heart and recited daily, turned over and over in his mind: 'I am sin, my work is sin, my soul is sin, my birth is in sin.' No, no, even that is a lie. Must forget all words learned by heart, the heart must flow free like a child's."
"The desire natural to mere mortals, to tell lies, to hide things, to think of one's own welfare, arose in him for the first time. He couldn't find the courage to shatter the respect and faith these people had placed in him. Is this pity, self-preservation, habit, inertia, sheer hypocrisy? The Sanskrit chant, learned by heart and recited daily, turned over and over in his mind: 'I am sin, my work is sin, my soul is sin, my birth is in sin.' No, no, even that is a lie. Must forget all words learned by heart, the heart must flow free like a child's."
reflective
Shoutout to Elisa Shua Dusapin bc my middle name is Elisa spelled that way... Not many of us out there so we have to stick together 🤝
"I wanted to be the only one he saw. And all he could say was he liked the way I saw things. That I had a good eye. Those were his words. A cold reality, devoid of emotion. He needed me to help him see. I. didn't want to be his eyes on my world. I wanted to be seen. I wanted him to see me with his own eyes."
"I wanted to be the only one he saw. And all he could say was he liked the way I saw things. That I had a good eye. Those were his words. A cold reality, devoid of emotion. He needed me to help him see. I. didn't want to be his eyes on my world. I wanted to be seen. I wanted him to see me with his own eyes."
mysterious
reflective
So many big ideas in such a little book!
"Over the course of the day, there was a progression—though it remained incomplete—towards unmediated knowledge. It is important to remember that their point of departure was a particularly laborious kind of mediation. Humboldt's procedure was, in fact, a system of mediations: physiognomic representation came between the artist and nature. Direct perception was eliminated by definition. And yet, at some point, the mediation had to give way, not so much by breaking down as by building up to the point where it became a world of its own, in whose signs it was possible to apprehend the world itself, in its primal nakedness."
"Over the course of the day, there was a progression—though it remained incomplete—towards unmediated knowledge. It is important to remember that their point of departure was a particularly laborious kind of mediation. Humboldt's procedure was, in fact, a system of mediations: physiognomic representation came between the artist and nature. Direct perception was eliminated by definition. And yet, at some point, the mediation had to give way, not so much by breaking down as by building up to the point where it became a world of its own, in whose signs it was possible to apprehend the world itself, in its primal nakedness."
emotional
reflective
"Blue-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed, they watched, mesmerized by something that they sensed but didn’t understand: the absence of caprice in what the policemen did. The abyss where anger should have been. The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all."
challenging
informative
"This is the Lacan who demonstrates the extent to which we are subjugated by signifiers, by the discourse of our parents that determines our fate, and declares that through analysis we must come to accept that we are mortified by language, and thus, in a sense, the living dead (our bodies are overwritten, and we are inhabited by language that lives through us). We must subjectify that mortal fate, make it our own; we must assume responsibility for the roll of the dice at the beginning of our universe our parents' desire that brought us into being bringing ourselves into being where their desire had served as cause of our own."