This is the second post in the series about the book As Meat Loves Salt by M. McCann, which has wounded me so deeply that months after reading it, I still can’t pass a full hour awake without thinking about it. In the first post, I made some introductory remarks and then talked about the cover and the blurb. In this one, I’ll talk about the title, and what it means.
Continue reading As Meat Loves Salt: On the meaning of the titleCategory: Quotes
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
E. A. Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
And thus, as a closer and still close intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempts at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom.
From “What the Wind Knows”
By A. Harmon
The actual quote in the original form, with more text captured for context, can be found under the break. What follows here is a version I altered to make it more general and gender-neutral, because I was especially impressed and affected by the sentiments as they apply to my current obsession with War and Strife from Darksiders. I also cast one part as verse, because that’s how it sounded. Beautiful!
If all people loved their spouses as I love mine,
we would be a useless lot.
Or maybe… the world would know peace.
Maybe the wars would end and the strife would cease
as we centered our lives on loving,
and being loved.
…
I know the novelty will wear off, and life will intrude before long. But it is not the newness of love, the newness of us, that has captured me. It is the opposite! It is as if we always were and always will be, as though our love and our lives sprang from the same source and will return to that source in the end, intertwined and indistinguishable. We are ancient. Prehistoric! And predestined.
Image: Fractal flower by Luis-Bello
Continue reading From “What the Wind Knows”
Mrs. Dalloway
by V. Woolf
What an odd book! With no plot whatsoever, the narrative flows from one point of view to another, sometimes smoothly and sometimes making nearly unintelligible jumps. Almost every character that’s mentioned, no matter how thin their connection to the titular Mrs. Dalloway, her friends and family, gets to to ‘speak their mind’. I struggled to find connections. At times I struggled to tell what the hell was going on. But despite the oddity, I mostly enjoyed reading it. The writing is unorthodox, occasionally poetic, and I was struck by its beauty more than a few times. So here I’ll save some highlights:
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Two dismally absurd persons… were posted at the front door; and in one of them I recognized a postboy discharged from the Boar for running a young couple into a sawpit on their bridal morning, in consequence of intoxication rendering it necessary for him to ride his horse clasped round the neck with both hands.