[b]Zoë Heller
It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mystery.[/b]
Like, for example, what happens after we die?
I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.
Or, sure, go here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=179879
The conclusion of Dowell’s narrative offers not a resolution, so much as a plangent confirmation of complexities. While Ford would certainly have agreed with Dowell that it is a novelist’s business to make a reader ‘see things clearly’, his interest in clarity had little to do with simplicity. There is no ‘getting to the bottom of things’, no triumphant answers to the epistemological muddle offered in this beautiful, bleak story - only a finer appreciation of that confusion. We may remove the scales from our eyes, Ford suggests, but only the better to appreciate the glass through which we see darkly.
That’s sort of my narrative too.
Music…had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense.
As if that makes a difference. In the moment for example.
One pretends that manners are the formalisation of basic kindness and consideration, but a great deal of the time they’re simply aesthetics dressed up as moral principles, aren’t they?
Let’s file this one under, “games people play”.
This is madness. You’re making it into something it’s not. It’s all in your mind.
Sheba was about to protest, and then she laughed. Isn’t that the worst place it could be?
No, not always.
Right, Mr. Objectivist?