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Domhnall

Domhnall

Currently reading

How the World Works
Noam Chomsky
The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939
W.H. Auden
Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930's
Samuel Hynes
Collected Poems
W.H. Auden

The Passion According to G.H. (Penguin Modern Classics)

The Passion According to G.H. (Penguin Modern Classics) - Clarice Lispector A meditation on the meaning of life, perhaps. Some excellent imagery as the book proceeds helps to compensate for a tedious start. Slow moving and at times disturbing. On balance I was not satisfied with the ideas expressed here and found the intrusion of God in some late chapters to be gratuitous and unconvincing. I worry about any writer seeking to speak like a mystic precisely because this can be all too successful as a device. It is thought provoking and at times very potent all the same, certainly superbly well written.

Incidentally, reviews I read on the net (not Goodreads) which place Clarice Lispector in the company of Joyce, Borges and Kafka are to my mind both mistaken and also misleading. They simply set up expectations and criteria that are a nuisance. She is certainly worth reading but on her own terms.

I always kept a question mark to my left and another to my right.

Listen, faced with the living cockroach, the worst discovery was that the world is not human, and that we are not human.

If "truth" were whatever I could understand - it would end up being just a small truth, one my size.

Ah people put the idea of sin in sex. But how innocent and childish that sin is. The real hell is that of love. Love is the experience of a greater sin - it is the experience of the mud and the degradation and the worst joy."

To me as to everyone, everything had been given, but I wanted more: I wanted to know about that everything. And I had sold my soul in order to find out. But now I was understanding that I had not sold it to the devil, but much more dangerously: to God. Who had let me see. Since He knew that I would not know how to see whatever I saw: the explanation of an enigma is the repetition of the enigma.

But listen for a moment. I am not speaking of the future. I am speaking of a permanent present. And that means that hope does not exist because it is no longer a postponed future, it is today. Because the God does not promise. He is much greater than that: He is and never stops being. We are the ones who cannot stand this always present light and so we promise it for later, just in order not to feel it today, right this very minute. The present is the face today of the God. The horror is that we see God in life itself. It is with our eyes fully open that we see God. And if I postpone the face of reality until after my death - it's out of guile, because I prefer to be dead when it is time to see Him and that way I think I shall not really see Him, just as I only have the courage to really dream when I sleep.

Relinquishing hope means that I shall have to start living and not just promise myself life. And this is the greatest fright I can have. I used to hope. But the God is today: His kingdom has already begun.