20120620

GITTA SERENY

Gitta Sereny passed away in Cambridge on the 14th of June 2012, at the age of 91. A wonderful journalist and the author of some of the best books I've ever read about the Holocaust, she will be truly missed.




20120613

Lionel Shriver, 1972

20120612

READING IN TENERIFE, DECEMBER 2011

Tired but the weather was good.


20120605

THE TEXTURE OF HER DAILY LIFE

Still, there had been certain evenings like this one, when she would be ushered into a young man's car. The feeling was not of being attractive precisely, but rather of not having to entertain. It was breath-taking; to be ensconced in another person's company, yet to be relieved of the relentless minute-by-minute obligation to redeem one's existence - for there is some sense in which socially we are all on the Late Show, grinning, throwing off nervous witticisms, and crossing our legs, as a big hook behind the curtains lurks in the wings.


It was peculiar how the more you got to know someone, the more you grew to appreciate how little you knew, how little you had ever known - as if progressive intimacy didn't involve becoming ever more perceptive, but growing only more perfectly ignorant.


Maybe to live successfully alongside anyone was to come to understand not how much he was like you but how much he was not-you - and hence to allow, as we do so rarely with one another, that the person sprawled across from you on the sofa is actually there.
- The post-birthday world, Lionel Shriver

20120601

DISTORTIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Finished reading The Easter Parade last week. It was beautiful. Read another Drabble one after that, Jerusalem the golden. Quote:

She knew, moreover, that she had found something that she had been looking for, and that events would prove the significance of her discovery: she wondered only at the means of her recognition. The fact of it never ceased to astound her, and she would return over the ground constantly, searching for marks, for tracks and breaths and sighs and trodden grass and names and cloudy indications, because she could not forget that she had not recognized it at once, that it had required on her part some keenness of perception, some chancy courage, to see it: and she breathed perpetually an air of terror, a cold air of chance, an air in which she might for the whole of her life have missed it, marginally perhaps, but missed it and forever.


Now I'm reading The realms of gold by the same author. I went to Berlin Sunday-Wednesday, but didn't read a thing. Instead I did this:
Photo taken by Jan Bernhardtz,  http://janber.net/