Roger > Books: top-ten-2017‎ (10)

The Encyclopedia of Ideas helped me remember that the first floor, which [Freud] called the id, contains all our impulses an

The Encyclopedia of Ideas helped me remember that the first floor, which [Freud] called the id, contains all our impulses and urges. The middle floor is the ego, which tries to mediate between our desires and reality. And the uppermost level, the third floor, is the domain of His Majesty, the superego, which calls us to order sternly and demands that we take into account the effects of our actions on society.

They gathered at the car park in the hour before dawn and waited to be told what to do.

They gathered at the car park in the hour before dawn and waited to be told what to do. It was cold and there was little conversation. There were question that weren't being asked. The missing girl's name was Rebecca Shaw. When last seen she'd been wearing a white hooded top. A mist hung low across the moor and the ground was frozen hard. They were given instructions and then they moved off, their boots crunching on the stiffened ground and their tracks fading behind them as the heather sprang back into shape. […]

[…] The divers were going through the river again. A group of journalists waited for the shot, standing behind a cordon by the packhorse bridge, cameras aimed at the empty stretch of water, the breath clouding over their heads. In the lower field two of Jackson's boys were kneeling over a fallen ewe. There was a racket of camera shutters as the first diver appeared, the wetsuited head sleek and slow through the water. A second diver came around the bend, and a third. They took turns ducking through the arch on the bridge and then they were out of sight. The camera crews jerked their cameras from their tripods and began folding everything away. One of the Jackson boys bucked a quad bike across the field and told the journalists to move. The river ran empty and quick. The cement works was shut down to allow for a search. In a week the first snowdrops emerged along the verges past the cricket ground, which it seemed winter had yet a way to go. At the school, in the staff room the teachers kept their coats on and waited. Everything that might be said seemed like the wrong thing to say. […]

[…] There was talk. In the meadows Thompson's men worked the baler along the lines of cut grass, the thick sward gathered up and spun into dense bales. Every few hundred yards the tractor paused and there was a tumbling inside the machine and a neatly wrapped bale rolled softly from the hatch onto the field. The wood pigeons laid eggs in their nests in the beech wood and in the horse chestnut by the cricket ground. They took turns sitting on the eggs, but there were still plenty stolen by magpies and crows. On the bank above the abandoned lead pits the badgers started coming out of their sett before dark. The sows with cubs were looking for food and the boars were looking for mates. There were conflicts. […]

[…] White campion thronged the verges along the road towards town, their neat flowers wrinkling as the seed-heads began to swell. In the beech wood the young foxes were ready to move on. It was Martin's turn to put together the Harvest Festival display at the church, and despite regular promises not to let anyone down he disappeared at the last moment. Irene and Winnie stepped in. The river turned over beneath the packhorse bridge and ran steady to the millpond weir. Lynsey Smith came home from Leeds and moved back in with her parents. […]

[…] Lynsey Smith said it was a safe bet Ms. Bowman would ask if they needed to chat. She made finger-quotes around the word chat. Deepak said at least it would be a way of getting out of French. Sophie looked away, and saw Andrew waiting at the other bus stop with Irene, his mother. He was the same age as they were but he went to a special school. Their bus pulled up and James warned Liam not to make up any bullshit about Beck Shaw. It snowed and the snow settled thickly. […]

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Just as religion evolved as a way to contemplate and live before the unknowable, so now we have converted to the opposite practice, to which we are no less devoted: the practice of knowing everything, and believing that knowledge is concrete, and always arrived at through the faculties of the intellect. […] The more [Descartes] talks about following a straight line out of the forest, the more appealing it sounds to me to get lost in that forest, where we once lived in wonder, and understood it to be a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of being and the world.

Epstein, new again to everything—new to the blazing white light off the waves, to the crying of the muezzin at dawn, new to the loss of appetite, to the body lightening, to a release from order, to the departing shore of the rational, new again to miracles, to poetry—took an apartment where he would never have lived in a thousand years, had he been living a thousand years, which, new again most of all to himself, he might have been.

God created Eve out of Adam's rib. Why? Because first an empty space needed to be made in Adam to make room for the experience of another. Did you know that the meaning of Chava—Eve, in Hebrew—is 'experience'?

But Lech lecha was never really about moving from the land of his birth over the river to the unknown land of Canaan. To read it like that is to miss the point, I think, since what God was demanding was so much harder, was very nearly impossible: for Abram to go out of himself so that he might make space for what God intended him to be.

Is the rift dividing them in fact a bottomless chasm; is that why such powerful turbulences have been released? And is it a rift between Black and White? Or Poor and Rich? Stranger and Friend? Or between those whose fathers have died and those whose fathers are still alive? Or those with curly hair and those with straight? Those who call their dinner fufu and those who call it stew? Or those who like to wear yellow, red, and green t-shirts and those who prefer neckties? Or those who like to drink water and those who prefer beer? Or between speakers of one language and another? How many borders exist within a single universe?

“I don’t know how to say this without offending the new anti-Semites, God forbid, but for fuck’s sake, people, don’t you think your attitude is just a little bit grating? ’Cause sometimes I get the impression that if, let’s say, an Israeli scientist came up with a cure for cancer, right? A medicine that would finish off that cancer once and for all? Well, then I guarantee you the next day people all over the world would start speaking out and there’d be protests and demonstrations and UN votes and editorials in all the European papers, and they’d all be saying, ‘Now wait a minute, why must we harm cancer? And if we must, do we really need to completely annihilate it right off the bat? Can’t we try and reach a compromise first? Why go in with force straightaway? Why not put ourselves in its shoes and try to understand how cancer itself experiences the disease from its own perspective? And let’s not forget that cancer does have some positives. Fact is, a lot of patients will tell you that coping with cancer made them better people. And you have to remember that cancer research led to the development of medications for other diseases—are we just going to put an end to all that, in such a destructive manner? Has history taught us nothing? Have we forgotten the darker eras? And besides’ ”—he adopts a contemplative expression—“ ‘is there really anything about man that makes him superior to cancer and therefore entitled to destroy it?’ ”

His eyes rolled terribly. Yes: terribly. Or perhaps not so terribly. Perhaps they merely glanced about him, at the woman, at the bed

His eyes rolled terribly. Yes: terribly. Or perhaps not so terribly. Perhaps they merely glanced about him, at the woman, at the bed, at the room. Growing up in the not infrequently perilous circumstances in which he had grown up, he was aware of the fragility of his body. He knew how little it took to make a man into meat: the wrong blow, the wrong gunshot, the wrong flick of a blade, turn of a car, presence of a microorganism in a handshake, a cough. He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing.

In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her.

    The background is rich dark blue, Daniel said. A blue much darker than the sky. On top of the dark blue, in the middle of the picture, there's a shape made of pale paper that looks like a round full moon. On top of the moon, bigger than the moon, there's a cut-out black and white lady wearing a swimsuit, cut from a newspaper or fashion magazine. And next to her, as if she's leaning against it, there's a giant human hand. And the giant hand is holding inside it a tiny hand, a baby's hand. More truthfully, the baby's hand is also holding the big hand, holding it by its thumb. Below all this, there's a stylized picture of a woman's face, the same face repeated several times, but with a different coloured curl of real hair hanging over its nose each time— […]

    All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing. […] All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. […] All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimized. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked.

    November again. It's more winter than autumn. That's not mist. It's fog.
    The sycamore seeds hit the glass in the wind like—no, not like anything else, like sycamore seeds hitting window glass.
    There've been a couple of windy nights. The leaves are stuck to the ground with the wet. The ones on the paving are yellow and rotting, wanwood, leafmeal. One is so stuck that when it eventually peels away, its leafshape left behind, shadow of a leaf, will last on the pavement till next spring.

Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and shingle, and I tasted on my lips

Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and shingle, and I tasted on my lips the salt air which is also like the flesh of oysters, and I felt my heart cleaving, as I felt it there in the dark wood on the green stair and as I feel it now: something severed, and something joined.

He drew in a breath and all the seasons were in it: spring greenness in the grass, and somewhere a dog-rose blooming; the secretive scene of fungus clinging to the oak, and underneath it all something sharper waiting in a promise of winter.

PS—As you see, I could not resist sending you a primrose, though I was too impatient to press it well, and it has stained the page. I never could learn to bide my time! S.

An exceedingly tall and unkempt fellow was making his way toward us through the darkness.

This was highly irregular. It was after hours; the front gate would be locked.

The boy had been delivered only that day. That is to say, the man has most likely been here—

Quite recently.

That afternoon.

Highly irregular.

The gentleman seemed lost. Several time he stopped, looked about, retraced his steps, reversed course.

He was softly sobbing.

    Though the things of the world were strong with me still.
    Such as, for example: a gaggle of children trudging through a side-blown December flurry; a friendly match-share beneath some collision-tilted streetlight; a frozen closk, bird-visited within its high tower; cold water from a tin jug; toweling off one's clinging shirt post-June rain.
    Pearls, rags, buttons, rug-tuft, beer-froth.
    Someone's kind wishes for you; someone remembering to write; someone noticing that you are not at all at ease.
    A bloody roast death-red on a platter; a hedgetop under-hand as you flee late to some chalk-and-woodfire-smelling schoolhouse.
    Geese above, clover below, the sound of one's own breath when winded.
    The way a moistness in the eye will blur a field of stars; the sore place on the shoulder a resting toboggan makes; writing one's beloved's name upon a frosted window with a gloved finger.
    Tying a shoe; tying a knot on a package; a mouth on yours; a hand on yours; the ending of the day; the beginning of the day; the feeling that there will always be a day ahead.
    Goodbye, I must now say goodbye to all of it.