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medium-paced
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18—‘My wife died in December,’ he said.
Olive watched the river. ‘Then you’re in hell,’ she said.
‘Then I’m in hell.’
31—The God Abandons Anthony, Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, 1911
40—He also experiences resentment when others shy away from the facts, even the simple use of a name. He feels sharply the loss of shared vocabulary, of ‘tropes, teases, short cuts, in-jokes, silliness, faux rebukes, amatory footnotes.’
41—offers us stylishness as a defence against banality. It may be relevant here that both his parents were teachers of French, that he wrote the prize-winning Flaubert’s Parrot and that he has been elected Commander of L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His attempt to outmaneuvere oblivion with style and cool egoism belongs in a heroic French tradition of thinking about the world. It recalls existentialism. His commitment to style at all costs helps lend Levels of Life some of its special potency.
He notes his impulse to report news to his wife in order to make it feel real to him, how constantly he talks to her, keeping alive their lost private language. He relishes hearing ‘even the slightest new thing about her, a previously unreported memory, a piece of advice she gave years ago, a flash-back of her in ordinary animation…’ Even her appearances in others’ dreams fascinate him, as if in this way he can safeguard her communication with him and keep it alive. Yet he also sees how changeable and how individual ‘grief-work’ is. Is grief a state, while mourning is a process? They must overlap. He enquires what ‘success’ might consist of, in mourning: does it lie in remembering? Or in forgetting? Some terrors die down. The temptation of suicide recedes, cheerfulness and pleasure return. He finally comes to see how grief is the negative image of love and its inevitable dark reflection.
44—It’s crazy how One Art still ruffles my imagination.
45 just for this opening—Not long after finishing his masterpiece, Anna Karenina, Tolstoy, now in his fifties, suffered the excruciating crisis that resulted in his writing A Confession. This treatise saw life as pointless while discussing four possible solutions: ignorance, pleasure-seeking, suicide or simple-minded faith. Before Anna Karenin Tolstoy had been the admired great writer who—it is said—saw human life on the analogy of a ballroom; afterwards, the revered sage increasingly rejected his own fiction and pictured life as a slaughterhouse.
51—Stoicism has been called ‘Buddhism with attitude’, and might be boiled down to a series of precepts: live each day carefully and attentively.
52—This final misfortune, Seneca suggests, prompted him to write to her. He advocated courage; he also advocated a strategy for inoculating oneself against misfortune by a process of rehearsal.
55 Beowulf —whose son has been accidentally killed by his brother, so that the father has no way of avenging him.
57 cool story and—The John Hannah character quips that his gay partner preferred funerals to weddings, because ‘it is easier to get enthusiastic about a ceremony once has an outside chance of eventually being involved in.’
62—Shakespeare Lear Act V Scene iii and Macbeth Act IV Scene iii
66—she inserts a hand into each boot, feeling the empty shapes of his feet
78—Edna St Vincent Millay, Time Does Not Bring Relief
83—I want to adapt and grow Rilke’s line to this: Then at last, when we meet, Death bows her head and weeps.
X – Would you advise your little friends, the chubby brains over whom you have charge, not to fall in love then? Is that what this whole time has taught us?
Well first, it has been only seven months and I have an eternity yet to not being able to stop loving them. But say I entertain my body’s pace of the next and wanting change and adventure, and say that I am indeed in the hindsight portion of my shattering grief and that the clawed sheaves of muscle hanging off my throat and chest are invisible to everyone—then that is the question, if I could still endorse love. And yet there is no question. Fall in love. Be careful, as ever before, who to and how you give your heart out, but there is no doubt that guarding it from love is in no way keeping it safer, if anything, that is keeping it constricted in eternal non-use and the lack of exercise will sever your joy just the same as losing someone you elected to love wholly. It’s the loving wholly that undoes all safety as well as danger—simultaneously the breath of relief and of eventual vacuum that eventually will extinguish anything inside you. My advice then, haunting realise your lack of choice, and bravely face whatever offering you are besieged with—love, loss, or nothing at all. Regardless, grief will come, a lot of grief will come.
105—Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just
X—I find it miraculous of some finality that I, who I come from, where I was grafted, can read.
116—I should read Year of Magical Thinking
X—When I am dead, love, I hope no one tells you.
132—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead continues to be an absolute banger, best read alone in midnights in aimless spans of time.
144—I like how a certain English tradition is to say the words “you have given me the greatest possible happiness”. Always, objects bought, parried, situated, noticed, written of, collected, thrown, used as icons to populate screenplays. The English understanding of how to live is full of things to touch and trade.
148, almost – She brought him to life and to feeling, so that he is now in anguish.
155—can’t believe a completely dull man is inspiration for John Silver and behind master of my fate/ captain of my soul. He also has these fantastic lines to his credit:
Madam Life’s a piece in bloom
Death goes dogging everywhere:
She’s the tenant of the room,
He’s the ruffian on the stair.
Unsure if it’s the consequence of the day or this long scholarship or the coffee, but the breath I breathed went to the bottoms of my lungs.
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