“Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, — what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!” – Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” – Herman Melville
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.” – Herman Melville
“It is not down on any map; true places never are.” – Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
“I try all things, I achieve what I can.” – Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
“and Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.” – Herman Melville
You realize that you are living in a small and personal world. So there are many many different little worlds within a vast non-personal world. Sometimes we bump into another small world. Sometimes we bump into this vast world. All the conflicts are just difference among different little worlds.
Inkheart
Rain fell that night, a fine, whispering rain. Many years later, Meggie had only to close her eyes and she could still hear it, like tiny fingers tapping on the windowpane. A dog barked somewhere in the darkness, and however often she tossed and turned Meggie couldn’t get to sleep.
The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages. ‘I’m sure it must be very comfortable sleeping with a hard, rectangular thing like that under your head,’ her father had teased, the first time he found a book under her pillow. ‘Go on, admit it, the book whispers its story to you at night.’
‘Sometimes, yes,’ Meggie had said. ‘But it only works for children.’ Which made Mo tweak her nose. Mo. Meggie had never called her father anything else.
That night – when so much began and so many things changed for ever – Meggie had one of her favourite books under her pillow, and since the rain wouldn’t let her sleep she sat up, rubbed the drowsiness from her eyes, and took it out. Its pages rustled promisingly when she opened it. Meggie thought this first whisper sounded a little different from one book to another, depending on whether or not she already knew the story it was going to tell her. But she needed light. She had a box of matches hidden in the drawer of her bedside table. Mo had forbidden her to light candles at night. He didn’t like fire. ‘Fire devours books,’ he always said, but she was twelve years old, she could surely be trusted to keep an eye on a couple of candle flames. Meggie loved to read by candlelight. She had five candlesticks on the windowsill, and she was just holding the lighted match to one of the black wicks when she heard footsteps outside. She blew out the match in alarm – oh, how well she remembered it, even many years later – and knelt to look out of the window, which was wet with rain. Then she saw him.
The rain cast a kind of pallor on the darkness, and the stranger was little more than a shadow. Only his face gleamed white as he looked up at Meggie. His hair clung to his wet forehead. The rain was falling on him, but he ignored it. He stood there motionless, arms crossed over his chest as if that might at least warm him a little. And he kept on staring at the house.
I must go and wake Mo, thought Meggie. But she stayed put, her heart thudding, and went on gazing out into the night as if the stranger’s stillness had infected her. Suddenly, he turned his head, and Meggie felt as if he were looking straight into her eyes. She shot off the bed so fast the open book fell to the floor, and she ran barefoot out into the dark corridor. This was the end of May, but it was chilly in the old house.
There was still a light on in Mo’s room. He often stayed up reading late into the night. Meggie had inherited her love of books from her father. When she took refuge from a bad dream with him, nothing could lull her to sleep better than Mo’s calm breathing beside her and the sound of the pages turning. Nothing chased nightmares away faster than the rustle of printed paper.
But the figure outside the house was no dream.
The book Mo was reading that night was bound in pale blue linen. Later, Meggie remembered that too. What unimportant little details stick in the memory.
‘Mo, there’s someone out in the yard!’
Her father raised his head and looked at her with the usual absent expression he wore when she interrupted his reading. It always took him a few moments to find his way out of that other world, the labyrinth of printed letters.
‘Someone out in the yard? Are you sure?’
‘Yes. He’s staring at our house.’
Mo put down his book. ‘So what were you reading before you went to sleep? Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?’
Meggie frowned. ‘Please, Mo! Come and look.’
He didn’t believe her, but he went anyway. Meggie tugged him along the corridor so impatiently that he stubbed his toe on a pile of books, which was hardly surprising. Stacks of books were piled high all over the house – not just arranged in neat rows on bookshelves, the way other people kept them, oh no! The books in Mo and Meggie’s house were stacked under tables, on chairs, in the corners of the rooms. There were books in the kitchen and books in the lavatory. Books on the TV set and in the wardrobe, small piles of books, tall piles of books, books thick and thin, books old and new. They welcomed Meggie down to breakfast with invitingly opened pages, they kept boredom at bay when the weather was bad. And sometimes you fell over them.
‘He’s just standing there!’ whispered Meggie, leading Mo into her room.
‘Has he got a hairy face? If so, he could be a werewolf.’
‘Oh, stop it!’ Meggie looked at him sternly, although his jokes made her feel less scared. Already, she hardly believed any more in the figure standing in the rain – until she knelt down again at the window. ‘There! Do you see him?’ she whispered.
Mo looked out through the raindrops running down the pane, and said nothing.”
‘Didn’t you promise burglars would never break into our house because there’s nothing here to steal?’ whispered Meggie.
‘He’s not a burglar,’ replied Mo, but as he stepped back from the window his face was so grave that Meggie’s heart thudded faster than ever. ‘Go back to bed, Meggie,’ he said. ‘This visitor has come to see me.’
He left the room before Meggie could ask what kind of visitor, for goodness’ sake, turned up in the middle of the night? She followed him anxiously. As she crept down the corridor she heard her father taking the chain off the front door, and when she reached the hall she saw him standing in the open doorway. The night came in, dark and damp, and the rushing of the rain sounded loud and threatening.
‘Dustfinger!’ called Mo into the darkness. ‘Is that you?’
Dustfinger? What kind of a name was that? Meggie couldn’t remember ever hearing it before, yet it sounded familiar, like a distant memory that wouldn’t take shape properly.
At first, all seemed still outside except for the rain falling, murmuring as if the night had found its voice. But then footsteps approached the house, and the man emerged from the darkness of the yard, his long coat so wet with rain that it clung to his legs. For a split second, as the stranger stepped into the light spilling out of the house, Meggie thought she saw a small furry head over his shoulder, snuffling as it looked out of his rucksack and then quickly disappearing back into it.
the above is a part of the first chapter, A stranger in the Night, of the book. it is well written. the rain runs from foreground to background, and back. the narrative from the author to Meggie. Meggie, Meggie’s father Mo, and then Dustfinger are all introduced. the contrast between Meggis’s earnest and surprise and her father’s calm and ease.
skin in the game
there’s a sense in which Martha feels like she has done this: she has wanted to. She has loved Karen secretly. So now it feels like she is being punished for the thought, as if the thought was the deed in itself.
Martha feels trapped because now even her thoughts are not safe. It wasn’t enough that she resisted and disowned her thoughts, never acknowledging even to herself how much and how deeply she loved Karen. The fact that she has despised herself for having the thoughts, and then wiped out even the trace of that hatred from her conscious self-experience so that she leaves no evidence at all of her love even in her own mind, even this has not been enough of a sacrifice or tribute. To even have been capable of such love at all is wrong. What she is is incorrect.
Zizek has once said that if you can explain why you love someone that means you don’t really love them.
notes
秋风摇落北国情，冬雪苍茫赤子心。可望而不可及\ 平常心\ 瓜熟蒂落 水到渠成
汪先是革命青年。“慷慨歌燕市，从容作楚囚。引刀成一快，不负少年头。”
后有汪兆铭的《双照楼诗词稿》。送别：“把酒长亭杯已空，行人车马各西东。枫林不共斜阳去，自向荒郊寂寞红。”
《游日内瓦湖》，颔联作“暂留残照天边树，尽抹微云雨后山”
《舟中晓望》：朝霞微紫远天蓝，初日融波色最酣。正是暮春三月里，莺飞草长忆江南。
《寄冰如》(冰如是陈璧君的字)，一去匆匆太可怜，只余巾影淡于烟。风帆终是无情物，人自回头舟自前。
“孤悬破碎山河影，苦照萧条羁旅人。南去北来如梦梦，生离死别太频频”
《朝中措—重九登北极阁》城楼百尺倚空苍，雁背正低翔。满地萧萧落叶，黄花留住斜阳。阑干拍遍，心头块垒，眼底沧桑，为问青山绿水，能禁几度兴亡？
晓烟: 槲叶深黄枫叶红，老松奇翠欲拏空；朝来别有空濛意，都在苍烟万顷中。初阳如月逗轻寒，咫尺林原成远看；记得江南烟雨里，小姑鬟影落春澜。
月兮月兮！我生与尔长相从，有影必共光必同，周旋朔漠千堆雪，流转南溟万里风。
R.J.Palacio, Wonder: When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind. “宁入歧途，勿失慈悲“，
The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution, By Barbara W. Tuchman
The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (Oxford History of the United States), By Robert Middlekauff
Empire by Default, By Ivan Musicant
The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898, By Dominic Green
Washington’s Circle: The Creation of the President, By David S. Heidler, Jeanne T Heidler
Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers During World War II, By John Strausbaugh
Takahashi Rumiko, the goddess of manga
風又搖醒昨夜的夢
心內泛起陣陣隱痛
眼眶微腫 染著落日的紅
藏好剛哭過的面孔
雨又撞進淚眼之中
思念又在蠢蠢欲動
此刻的痛 源於一時放縱
卻讓我不敢再觸碰
孤單一人走在冷雨中
街燈一盞一盞為我護送
身邊沒你陪同 我無所適從
拖著的影子才那麼重
孤單一人走在冷雨中
冷風一陣一陣將我推動
餘生南北西東 山水不相逢
徹底忘記你這麼難好痛
風裡跟她再度抱擁
眼裡盡是愛慕愛寵
內心悲痛翻起思緒淚湧
歡笑此刻消散如夢
真相隱隱滲入晚空
撲朔迷離似幻似空
內心冰凍恍惚一切落空
封印往昔真意或情重
孤單身影走進冷雨中
街燈一盞一片為我護送
身邊沒你影踪 只盼得虛空
莫名失去像命運愚弄
孤單身影走進冷雨中
北風呼呼將我的愛觸動
餘生南北西東 不拖不欠奉
這生難再有這情義濃
《花影》: 重重叠叠上瑶台,几度呼童扫不开,才被太阳收拾去,又着明月送将来。
形象大于意义，不
一定必局限于一种解释。不同的人可能体会到不同的意思。
It seems to me that a life lived all the way up embraces the dangers of failure, and is undertaken nonetheless.
William James’s pragmatism, which Milch codifies as “you can work your way to right thinking, but you can’t think your way to right working”
There’s a streak of gnosticism here, a belief that the world as we see it, while real and solid, is also a concealing veil through which we have to pierce in order to understand even some small part of the truth.
Deadwoods, Tweed: I am an old man, broken in health and cast down in spirit… Recognizing further resistance as a futility, offering unqualified surrender and supplicating mercy, I herewith submit my testimony.
The act of creativity is an act of faith. Nobody makes something unless they feel there’s an audience for it. The belief that that audience exists may be unfounded, but it’s a belief we have to have if we’re to continue doing this, whatever this is.
Making art is a statement of faith in humanity, even if you don’t feel that faith. The art speaks for itself and is possibly greater than the artist, who is, after all, only human.
Art can convert our troubled lives into something that holds the potential for joy. The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past. It lives in us and it’s up to us what we do with it.
All items listed above belong in the world
In which all things are continuous,
and are parts of the original dream which
I am now trying to discover the logic of. This
Is the process whereby pain of the past in its pastness
May be converted into the future tense
Of Joy.
R.W.B.Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975)
Edith Wharton, The age of innocence, 1920
book: Edith’s Diary, by Patricia Highsmith, 1977