Myrti 📚

😂🤣

Merry Christmas David!
Thank you for the great quotes and "Along the way".

"And so, looking at what happened to Maxim, I doubted that technical progress fosters the progress of human beings. The second exists independently of the first and, in all honesty, most likely does not exist. The steam engine makes travel more convenient but wayfarers themselves become no better."

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
The effect of technological advancements?:
"Maybe, contrary to expectations, it will also turn out that technological advancements will help to soften angry hearts and brighten muddled minds."

Me: Taking social media as an example, the opposite seems to happen. 🤦‍♂️

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
Progress and bombs:
"It is interesting how Brother Ilary writes about progress. The word had just come into fashion at the time and the chronicler avoids it when possible. He obviously does not like the word: it appeared on the Island with the first bombs."

or (most importantly) what made the current life bad. Perhaps that was why the fighters stopped speaking about a better life and replaced it with a new life. Many people back then doubted that it would be better, but nobody doubted that it would be new."

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
Better life or new life:
"What was lamentable: it was required in progressive circles to call the evildoers not evildoers but fighters for a better life. Nobody, including the fighters previously mentioned, knew either what that life consisted of ...

2/

If one of those components is lost, you may await great misfortunes."

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
Feeling & thought:
"The attacks that began to overwhelm the Island in recent times lacked feeling: thought prevailed, vile and unfeeling thought. Feeling and thought necessarily reside in harmony, in order that they may check one another. ...

2/

so the letters could be read clearly even at a distance, but then the flame devoured them, leaving nothing."

Willful history:
"History is becoming ever more willful and I can no longer cope with it. But you, O brother, are a philosopher: perhaps you will understand something about it."

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
Burning history:
"Brother Galaktion tossed sheet after sheet into the stove. They first curled, losing strength from the flame and resisting it. They grew unbearably bright, as if they were emitting all the light amassed in them, ...

2/

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
Human behaviour:
"When the cat uttered harmony and love at the mention of Parfeny and Ksenia, the most mistrustful were satisfied on the strength of the cat’s words."

I enjoyed this one!
Especially the part where the bees get involved in the act: "Or that it [childbearing] would be fulfilled in a less sinful manner, such as budding."
Imagine that. No fun island.

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
Study history in order to understand the present:
"History, Agafon taught, tells much more about the present than the past."

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
The rhythm of biological life is also followed by other things:
"Some things cease their existence not because they are bad; their time has simply expired. And they begin their existence not because they are good; their time, to the contrary, has arrived."

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
Do people do this? :
"What made these people throw away their prosperity, exchange a calm life for the gravest of ordeals and, finally, arrive at the complete destruction of that life?
The idea of justice?"

Das tut wirklich richtig weh.

".. for young Willie McBride it all happened again. And again and again and again and again."
music.youtube.com/watch?v=ntt3...

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
You get out what you put in:
"long life has convinced me that people themselves create their own circumstances."

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
It cuts both ways:
"When the pagan gods were burned, sorcerers said the day would come when words in books would also burn."

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
This time it will be different 🤦‍♂️:
"It was thought (as now, too) that knowledge of the past is essential for those holding power. That notion seems fair to me. True, it is also fair to say that knowledge of history has yet to prevent anyone from making mistakes."

#Vodolazkin23 #AHistoryOfTheIsland
Tempus fugit:
"Time is slow during childhood, it lingers, but later it takes a running start and then, toward the end of life, it flies."

#McCarthy23 #BloodMeridian

For The Judge:

Straight = Winding: "The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? "

True = False: "Men’s memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not."

Seems to me The Judge was also a rabble magnet. Or maybe it's the other way round?

#McCarthy23 #BloodMeridian
Coagulated rabble:
"A dimly seething rabble had coagulated within. As if the raw board structure erected for their containment occupied some ultimate sink into which they had gravitated from off the surrounding flatlands."

2/

As an outsider I, like the Diegueños here, have wondered what it was that so savagely drove Americans westwards. The desperation, suffering, brutal cruelty and destruction seem so excessive that it must have been driven by something terrible. ?

and they watched each day for that thing to gather itself out of its terrible incubation in the house of the sun and muster along the edge of the eastern world and whether it be armies or plague or pestilence or something altogether unspeakable they waited with a strange equanimity."

#McCarthy23 #BloodMeridian

Savage, savage pursuit:

"They eked a desperate living from that land and they knew that nothing excepting some savage pursuit could drive men to such plight . .

2/

#McCarthy23 #BloodMeridian
Equality:
"In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence."

a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning."