A week of ups and downs – a trail race, an injured finger, a random Sunday evening adventure, a 24-hour stomach flu, a miserable workday, an invigorating professional conference, a beautiful evening run, a long call with a friend. Let it come, let it be, let it go.
The highlight was finishing Middlemarch yesterday, in one long final push. It’s one of those books where I’ll miss living with the characters for so long, each of their personalities and arcs so vivid. Some overall themes in the book: the importance of who you marry, how community inertia can defeat or deflect idealism but also help you find purpose and place, how financial struggles can multiply your frustrations, the value of a happy compromises and ordinary virtues.
Art
Lady at a Mirror by Candlelight oil on canvas by Godfried Schalcken.
Books
The Faerie Queene. Just dipped my toe in. We’ll see if it lasts.
Middlemarch. Finally done, loved it. One last round of quotes:
- “He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”
- “The lights were all changed for him both without and within.”
- “What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
- “He had begun to perceive that Mr. Brooke’s mind, if it had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it drop, run away in search of it, and not easily come back again.”
- “He looked almost angry. It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other’s presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning.”
- “If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.”
- “Caleb was very fond of music, and when he could afford it went to hear an oratorio that came within his reach, returning from it with a profound reverence for this mighty structure of tones, which made him sit meditatively, looking on the floor and throwing much unutterable language into his outstretched hands.”
- “It was one of those gray mornings after light rains, which become delicious about twelve o’clock, when the clouds part a little, and the scent of the earth is sweet along the lanes and by the hedgerows.”
- “He was now a prey to that worst irritation which arises not simply from annoyances, but from the second consciousness underlying those annoyances, of wasted energy and a degrading preoccupation”
- “For the majority, who are not lofty, there is no escape from sordidness but by being free from money-craving, with all its base hopes and temptations, its watching for death, its hinted requests, its horse-dealer’s desire to make bad work pass for good, its seeking for function which ought to be another’s, its compulsion often to long for Luck in the shape of a wide calamity.”
- “Rosamond played the quiet music which was as helpful to his meditation as the plash of an oar on the evening lake.”
- “that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly”
- “Damme if I think he meant to turn king’s evidence; but he’s that sort of bragging fellow, the bragging runs over hedge and ditch with him”
- “There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that—to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.”
- “Shallow natures dream of an easy sway over the emotions of others”
- “We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves.”
- “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Articles & Episodes & Twoots
Our interfaces have lost their senses.
Oliver Burkeman on toxic preconditions.
“Beyond interactivity, what a video game promises is not just rendered image and sound, not just narrative, not even just the joy of play, but inhabitation of an imaginal realm that is both deeply interior and collectively shared.”
Music
Terry Callier, What Color Is Love. Folk/soul/blues with a warm baritone. Check out “Dancing Girl“.
Nonkeen, All good?. “be a” pushes a lot of good buttons I love: mildly sinister bass, chattery snare, clicky cymbals, insistent tempo lots of layers.
Keith Jarrett, The Köln Concert. An hour of solo jazz explorations on piano.
Greg Foat, Gigi Masin, Dolphin. Lounge-y jazz shuffle, keyboards forward. I like “London Nights” and the walking bass in “Viento Calido“.
Hatebreeed, Perseverance. By-your-bootstraps motivational therapy metal, hell yes!
Movies
Touch of Evil. Dynamic and quickly-moving, everything tainted.
TV
Scandal, s1e1. Speaking of quickly-moving, this is breakneck TV. “My gut tells me everything I need to know.”
Bosch, s1e1. Felt good to dip back into the series, like putting on comfortable shoes.
Severance, s2e6. Burt is sketchy, huh. I liked the speculative fiction angles here: jealousy of yourself, jealousy of your partner’s innie, innie/outie adultery, innies with souls distinct from their outies, etc..
Dark Winds, s1e5-6. Just along for the ride.
Mark Larson 