A Suggestion

I was just toddling about Wikipedia, and saw that Unbearable Lightness of Being is based partially on a belief by Nietzsche about eternal recurrence, and is just generally existentialist in theme.  I can't remember what you guys were planning to read alongside Nietzsche, but maybe we should combine the two.  I can always read P&P&S&S some other time.  What say you both?

And, Happy last 1 Hour of Birthday, Claire.

happy happy birthday, claire!

H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y, C L A I R E !

I hope your 20th year is a good one, happy happy birthday!

I promise to slow down

I also apologize for my overly pedantic treatment of To the Lighthouse.  My enthusiasm for Virginia Woolf set an unrealistic precedent.  It would be as if they discovered a new and previously unknown Jane Austen novel, and Claire got to read it for the first time.  I just really love Woolf...

I've read about twenty pages of the Hemingway, and I like it significantly less, so I can promise not to be so overzealous from now on (until I start The Waves)...

I'm actually trying to read the Odyssey for a while, until we all get on the same page (har!).  It's an important precursor to one day reading Ulysses, which I must do before dying.

I have a few leads in my job search!  I won't talk about them because that would jinx it.

Anyway, continue reading and hope you guys are doing well.

Welcome Dana!

Now our blog is whole.  I read some of the Odyssey today in Barnes & Noble.  I'll probably start the Hemingway soon.  I do nothing but read these days.  I need a job.  Everyone already knows this though.  

I also complain when I'm not reading.  And sleep.  I do a lot of sleeping.

That's it though.  I hope you're both making progress...

poetrypoetry?

i have joined the blog! (though only after admiring the wit of the blog's name. was that you claire? clever clever) sorry for joining late, i was gallivanting around ny with my sister and was taking a break from the internet. i am now back in the bay, hanging out with the parental unit. i think i've already managed to annoy them. it's really a talent, being able to irritate my parents this rapidly.

so i have unfortunately not started reading mrs. dalloway (i left it at home), but i will start immediately, and will be on the lookout for the ideas you mentioned in your posts- vague desires, the moment, etc. i also will look over to the lighthouse again. i have to admit, though, I am slightly intimidated at the cerebral nature of these posts, i'm afraid my posts will not be as impressively intellectual.

in the past couple days i read the alchemist by paulo coelho instead. i found it in a crumpled pile of crap behind jillian's desk (along with like $20 of quarters), so i unceremoniously took it (and the quarters) and read it. have either of you read it? it was really a beautiful story. i also read half of the man who mistook his wife for a hat by oliver sacks, which is about various psychological disorders. have either of your read it? i bought it off the street in ny for $2, as well as purchasing a $3 copy of oliver twist. we better read oliver twist.

in other adventures, i went traipsing around central park the other day and made a new, um, friend. he's this intense old swiss-montengran painter. he told me about Daoism (it would help me find peace), instructed me to liberate myself and become a poet (find your talent! follow your passion!), and urged me to read Pablo Neruda ("so sensual"). this brings me to my point, which is, poetry! we cannot forget the goal of reading around 5 poems a week, right? i had some poems in mind (including mr. neruda), so would you guys be alright with me proposing our first set of poems?

and my new friend told me, among other things, that if i learned to breathe correctly (he demonstrated) that I would have an excellent sex life when i was 80. i said, why thank you. i will go do just that.

alright, i am off to rummage through my stuff to find mrs. dalloway. i'm sorry about your talkative roommate, claire... and i hope new york is enthralling, john.

Mrs Dalloway

I would be reading it now, but unfortunately my options are 1) stay in my room with my delicious bottle of wine and watch tv over the shriek of my surprise roommate's laughs and "ya know what I mean"s or 2) leave my wine to find a place where I can actually hear my own thoughts well enough to process a text as complex as Mrs. Dalloway. Frankly, wine is winning.

My only thoughts from today's reading (forty pages) are as follows: the moment. More to follow.

Also: She is on the phone. In my room. At 1:30 in the morning. That is all.

I have read roughly 10 pages

The going is rough. This is not my style of literature - so many long, rambling sentences, but with a vastly different structure from the more restrained Victorian rambling sentences, and such sudden transitions to different subjects, time periods, settings. It's all a little disorienting, and I don't think I'll know what to make of it until I've read quite a bit more. It's hard to concentrate here. My room is 100 degrees and everywhere else is noisy or uncomfortable. But I will soldier on.

PS Dana join the blog, dammit.

I have nothing to do.

It's true.  I went to the library today and bought more books.  I'm vaguely considering reading everything for my fall classes this summer, and then maybe I'll actually be prepared for my precepts for a change.  

To the Lighthouse got really good today.  I'm now realizing that a huge theme in Woolf's novels (and just modernism, in general) is impermanence, and the way we want to preserve a single moment in time and feel it forever and examine and understand it, but we can't, because time keeps moving forward.  As each of you read Mrs. Dalloway, *pay attention* to this theme ("leaden circles dissolved in the air").  This will become clearer as you read, Claire, given your newness to VW.

Also, time is such a huge factor in Woolf's novels simply because the book's emphasize character, rather than plot.  There is no plot pushing the novel forward; just time.  That's why Big Ben keeps sounding throughout Dalloway, bringing the focus of the characters (and therefore, the reader) to reality, to the shared notion of objectivity that must unite all the people in the novel and focus them on the exterior, despite their tendency to lose themselves inside their own thoughts.

To the Lighthouse: Initial Thoughts

I'm just more than half-way through the novel.  It's very good; I tend to think  I would be more gushing about it if I hadn't already read Mrs. Dalloway and a few of Woolf's essays and short-stories.  Her voice and narrative style cut so directly to the heart of her characters' thoughts and feelings, and create such a complex and believable world from so many perspectives, that I would probably recognize it without knowing who the author is, at this point.  Because of this, though, I fear the initial awe I felt when I got into Woolf almost a year ago could only be felt once.  

Another factor both contributing to and limiting my enthusiasm is the similarity between To the Lighthouse and Middlemarch.  It seems, thus far in the novel, that Woolf expanded upon a crucial idea that Eliot suggested; namely, that reality is inherently subjective, nothing is morally clear, and every character is so limited by his or her singleness of perspective that this lesson is difficult to learn.  Each work deals with this fact, however, in vastly different ways.  Though Eliot-the-realist uses an omniscient narrator who drops into the thoughts of each character, holds them up for us, and says "but you can't judge them, reader, because we're all just humans," Woolf-the-modernist uses only subjective narration the entire time, allowing the ideas she puts forth to come clear in themselves, without the interpretation from an objective narrator.  

A striking aspect of To the Lighthouse is the focus on "vague desires," a topic that catapults me back a month in time to my Nunokawa lectures on Eliot.  Each of the characters in To the Lighthouse (like, literally, all of them) seems to suffer this same problem that Dorothea Brooke made famous.  If you refer to my most recent Facebook quote, you'd find a relevant one by Lily Briscoe, as she is overcome with emotion while attempting to paint a scene of the Ramsay's yard.  She says of Mrs. Ramsay, "...but what could one say to her?  'I'm in love with you.'  No, that was not true.  "I'm in love with this all," waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children.  It was absurd, it was impossible."  Lily's overcome by emotions for everything she sees at this one ecstatic moment in time, but she doesn't know what the object is.  A similar idea, though less dramatic, comes up later in the novel as the narrator examines the feelings of William Bankes for Mrs. Ramsay: "He was not 'in love' of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many."  When I read that, it was clear that "unclassified affections" and "vague desires" were almost synonymous (damn that's hard to spell).  Looks like Woolf learned quite a bit from Eliot.

Claire: you should read To the Lighthouse at some point in the near future.  With Middlemarch fresh in your mind, the dialogue between the two of them could really great.

Dana: having read both, tell me what you think, at some point in our lives.  

Here's to Summer '08.  WooOOooOooh.