Saturday, December 31, 2022

the last book I ever read (Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt ten)

from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy:

Women enjoy a different history of madness. From witchcraft to hysteria we’re just bad news. We know that women were condemned as witches because they were mentally unstable but no one has considered the numbers—even few as they might be—of women who were stoned to death for being bright. That I havent wound up chained to a cellar wall or burned at the stake is not a testament to our ascending civility but to our ascending skepticism. If we still believed in witches we’d still be burning them. Hooknosed crones strapped into the electric chair. No one has ever seemed to comment that the stereotypical witch is meant to appear Jewish. I guess the skepticism is okay. If you can stomach what goes with it. I’m happy to be treated well but I know that it’s an uncertain business. When this world which reason has created is carried off at last it will take reason with it. And it will be a long time coming back. What happened to our turns?



Friday, December 30, 2022

the last book I ever read (Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt nine)

from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy:

So what might he say? For instance?

He might say that milk is the beverage of choice among all right-thinking nightfolk. Or he would say that if anything were true wouldnt everybody know it by now? Or that you shouldnt worry about what people think of you because they dont do it that often. Or that we are hardly creatures of the light in case you hadnt noticed. Or that the darkest hour is just before the storm. Or when you close your eyes do I go away? Do you?

Did he?

Yes. Me too.



Thursday, December 29, 2022

the last book I ever read (Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt eight)

from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy:

What about mathematics?

Mathematics is just sweat and toil. I wish it were romantic. It isnt. At its worst there are audible suggestions. It’s hard to keep up. You dont dare sleep and you may have been up for two days but that’s too bad. You find yourself making a decision and finding two more decisions waiting and then four and then eight. You have to force yourself to just stop and go back. Begin again. You’re not seeking beauty, you’re seeking simplicity. The beauty comes later. After you’ve made a wreck of yourself.

Is it worth it?

Like nothing else on earth.



Wednesday, December 28, 2022

the last book I ever read (Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt seven)

from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy:

We go to dinner. Sometimes with friends. We go to movies. We’re members of the Symphony. We go bowling.

You dont go bowling.

No. It must be my turn.

All right. Fire away.

It was just a joke. The bowling.

Bowling is not a joke. I love bowling. Bowling is my life.



Tuesday, December 27, 2022

the last book I ever read (Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt six)

from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy:

I brought a lighter but I didnt think about an ashtray.

I can use the glass.

All right. Did your parents fight?

No. Toward the end he wasnt around all that much. He spent a lot of time in the South Pacific blowing things up.

That sounds pretty much a criticism.

It’s not a criticism. Boys like blowing things up.



Monday, December 26, 2022

the last book I ever read (Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt five)

from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy:

You were born at Los Alamos.

Yes. Boxing Day. Nineteen fifty-one.

Boxing Day? What is that?

It’s the day after Christmas.



Saturday, December 24, 2022

the last book I ever read (Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt four)

from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy:

My father didnt sleep before the bomb and he didnt sleep after. I think most of the scientists didnt give that much thought to what was going to happen. They were just having a good time. They all said the same thing about the Manhattan Project. That they’d never had so much fun in their lives. But anyone who doesnt understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasnt been paying attention. It’s up there with fire and language. It’s at least number three and it may be number one. We just dont know yet. But we will.



Friday, December 23, 2022

the last book I ever read (Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt three)

from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy:

All right. What else?

What else. He was one of a group of scientists who went into Hiroshima after the war to report on the damage. I think he was sobered by what he saw. I cant really speak for him. Whoever made the bomb was going to blow something up with it and I’m sure he thought better us than them. Whoever them might turn out to be. The arguments about Truman’s decision generally center around the loss of life in a land invasion. My father had another take on it. He thought that if Japan had been defeated in a land invasion there would have been no miracle of reconstruction after the war. That Japan would have been humiliated as a nation and would have entered into a long decline. But as it was, they were not defeated in battle. They were defeated by witchcraft.

That doesnt seem a bit self-serving?

If you like. It might also be true.



Thursday, December 22, 2022

the last book I ever read (Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt two)

from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy:

What’s a gluon?

A conceivable notion.

Is it a force or a particle?

A particle. Although at that scale the distinction is not so clear.

What does it do?

It carries the news from quark to quark. It’s not that complicated. An atom is composed of smaller particles. Nucleons. And these particles are composed of quarks. Generally three. The quarks have dumb names. Top quark and bottom quark. Up and down quarks. A positron is made of two up quarks and a down quark. A neutron is made of two down quarks and an up quark. And so on. It all works. No one is quite sure why. But the gluon is what keeps the particles informed.



Wednesday, December 21, 2022

the last book I ever read (Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt one)

from Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy:

Well. I dont want to get off to a bad start. I just thought you might want to tell me a little about why you’re here.

I didnt have anyplace else to go.

And why here.

I’d been here before.

Why originally, then.

Because I couldnt get into Coletta.

And why Coletta?

It was where they sent Rosemary Kennedy. After her father had her brains scooped out.



Tuesday, December 20, 2022

the last book I ever read (Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, excerpt nine)

from Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature:

On another afternoon I entered Saint Patrice’s Church just off the Boulevard de la Marne to tell a priest that I’d had an abortion. I immediately realized this was a mistake. I felt bathed in a halo of light and for him I was a criminal. Leaving the church, I realized that I was through with religion.



Monday, December 19, 2022

the last book I ever read (Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, excerpt eight)

from Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature:

I would listen to Bach’s Passion According to St John in my room. When the Evangelist’s solo voice rang out in German to celebrate the Passion of Christ, I felt the ordeal I had suffered between October and January was being recounted in an unknown language. Then came the chorus Wohin! Wohin! The horizons parted, the kitchen in the Passage Cardinet, the probe and the blood all became engulfed in the misery of the world and eternal death. I felt saved.



Sunday, December 18, 2022

the last book I ever read (Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, excerpt seven)

from Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature:

On weekends the dorm was empty except for foreign students and a few girls whose parents lived far away. The nearby university canteen was closed. I didn’t mind, I had no desire for company. Thinking back, I realize I wasn’t afraid but serene: all I needed to do now was wait.

I was incapable of reading or listening to music. One day I took a sheet of paper and drew the Passage Cardinet the way I saw it as I was leaving the abortionist’s building: tall façades converging toward a crack in the background. The only time in my adult life when I have felt like drawing.



Saturday, December 17, 2022

the last book I ever read (Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, excerpt six)

from Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature:

She was concerned about my getting back home. She insisted on walking me to Pont-Cardinet station, where I could catch a train direct to Saint-Lazare. I wanted to take leave of her and be on my own. However, I didn’t want to offend her by turning down her offer, prompted—little did I know at the time—by the fear that I would be found unconscious on her doorstep. She grabbed a coat but kept on her slippers.



Friday, December 16, 2022

the last book I ever read (Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, excerpt five)

from Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature:

Thousands of girls have climbed up stairs and knocked on a door answered by a woman who is a complete stranger, to whom they are about to entrust their stomach and their womb. And that woman, the only person who can rid them of their misfortune, would open the door, in an apron and patterned slippers, clutching a dish towel, and inquire, “Yes, Miss, can I help you?”



Thursday, December 15, 2022

the last book I ever read (Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, excerpt four)

from Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature:

On December 31 I left Le Mont-Dore with a family who had offered to give me a lift back to Paris. I didn’t join in the conversation. At one point the woman said that the girl in the maid’s room had miscarried, “she was moaning all night.” All I remember about the journey was the rainy weather and that remark. This, and other sentences, either frightening or comforting, mostly from strangers, guided me toward the ordeal, supporting me like a viaticum until I too went through with it.



Wednesday, December 14, 2022

the last book I ever read (Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, excerpt three)

from Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature:

I turned all my attention to sport, hoping that my strenuous efforts or maybe even a fall might dislodge “that thing,” making it unnecessary for me to visit the woman in the 17th arrondissement. When Annick lent me her skiing gear, which I couldn’t afford to hire, I would repeatedly tumble, imagining each time I did that I was inflicting the fall that would save me. One day, after P and Annick had refused to climb any further, accompanied by Gontran alone I decided to brave the summit of Puy Jumel in my fake leather boots with their flared tops that let in the snow. I trudged on ahead, my eyes glued to the slope, dazzled by the reflection, finding it more and more difficult to extricate my feet from the powdery snow, driven by the overriding urge to make that embryo let go. I was convinced I had to push back my own limits and reach the top of the mountain to get rid of it. I wore myself out to kill it under me.



Tuesday, December 13, 2022

the last book I ever read (Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, excerpt two)

from Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature:

It has cost me quite some effort to resist the powerful hold of these images and leave behind the pale winter sunshine flooding the Place Saint-Marc in Rouen, the lyrics of Soeur Sourire or even the hushed atmosphere of the medical office on the Boulevard de l’Yser, belonging to a physician whose name I have long forgotten. To capture that invisible, elusive reality unknown to memory that had sent me scouring the streets in search of an unlikely doctor—the law.

The law was everywhere. In the euphemisms and understatements of my diary; the bulging eyes of Jean T; the so-called forced marriages, the musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the shame of women who aborted and the disapproval of those who did not. In the sheer impossibility of ever imagining that one day women might be able to abort freely. As was often the case, you couldn’t tell whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned. People judged according to the law, they didn’t judge the law.



Monday, December 12, 2022

the last book I ever read (Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, excerpt one)

from Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature:

(About ten years ago I read in the newspaper Le Monde that the Singing Nun, as she was known throughout the world, had committed suicide. The article stated that after the hugely successful hit Dominique, she had come into conflict with the clergy, had eventually left the orders and moved in with a woman. Over the years she had given up singing and had sunk into oblivion. She had taken to drinking. I was deeply moved by her story. She couldn’t have imagined ever ending up that way—social misfit, alcoholic, renegade sister with homosexual proclivities. Yet this, I felt, was the woman who had held my hand as I roamed the streets of Martainville, a lost, solitary figure. We had both lost our bearings, although at different moments in time. What gave me the courage to go on living that afternoon was the voice of a woman who was to hit rock bottom and die. I passionately hoped that life had brought her some small glimmer of happiness and that, on those lonely, whisky-sodden evenings, having learned the contemporary meaning of niquer—to screw—she could tell herself that, at the end of the day, she really did screw all the other nuns.

SÅ“ur Sourire is one of the many women I have never met, and with whom I might have very little in common, but who have always been close to my heart. Be they dead or alive, real people or fictional characters, they form an invisible chain of artists, authoresses, literary heroines and figures from my childhood. I feel that they embrace my own story.)



Thursday, December 8, 2022

the last book I ever read (The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt ten)

from The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy:

He got his bicycle from the courtyard of the bodega at Cala Sabina and hung the bag over the handlebars and set out up the road toward San Javier and the headlands at La Mola. Fields of new wheat slashing softly in the roadside dark. Up through the pine forest. Pushing the bike. Alone in the world.



Wednesday, December 7, 2022

the last book I ever read (The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt nine)

from The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy:

The city was cold and gray. Gray stooks of snow along the curb. The date for registration at the university came and went. She’d not been out in days. Then weeks. Her brother sent her a television set and she sat looking at it still in the box. It sat there all day. Finally she set about unpacking it. She put on her robe and opened the door and got the television up in her arms and went down the hallway with it and knocked at the last door with the back of her hand. Mrs Grimley, she called. She waited. Finally the old woman cracked the door and peered out.



Tuesday, December 6, 2022

the last book I ever read (The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt eight)

from The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy:

The first spits of rain fell.

Do you mind terribly if we dont loiter? How come you never got another cat?

I just didnt want to lose anything else. I’m all lost out.



Monday, December 5, 2022

the last book I ever read (The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt seven)

from The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy:

Was drinking a problem?

I don’t know. I guess I’d have to say it was. I’d wake up in strange places. I woke up one time in somebody’s parked car and I thought, well, what if you woke up dead? That kind of got to me. I mean, do you think if you died drunk you’d sober up before you met Jesus?

Good question. I don’t know.

I thought about that. Standin in front of him drunk. What would he say. Hell, what would you say?

I guess I dont think your soul gets drunk.

Webb thought about that. Well, he said. Maybe yours dont.



Sunday, December 4, 2022

the last book I ever read (The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt six)

from The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy:

It was dark by the time he reached Hattiesburg. He had turned on the lights at dusk and he drove to the Alabama State line just east of Meridian in one hour flat. One hundred and ten miles. It was seventy miles to Tuscaloosa and the highway was straight and empty except for an occasional semi and he opened the Maserati up and drove the forty miles to Clinton Alabama in eighteen minutes redlining the engine twice at what the speedometer logged as a hundred and sixty-five miles an hour. By then he thought he’d probably used up most of his luck with the State police and the small town speedtraps he’d blown through and he motored leisurely through Tuscaloosa and Birmingham and crossed the Tennessee State line just south of Chattanooga five hours and forty minutes after leaving New Orleans.



Saturday, December 3, 2022

the last book I ever read (The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt five)

from The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy:

He went upstairs and fed the cat and stretched out on the bed with the cat on his stomach. You are the best cat, he said. I dont think I ever knew a finer cat.

He thought that he would go out and get something to eat. Then he thought he would see what was in the little refrigerator. Then he fell asleep.



Friday, December 2, 2022

the last book I ever read (The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt four)

from The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy:

It just came to him.

Not exactly. Still, it’s a simple enough idea. That nucleons are composed—as it were—of a small companionship of lesser particles. Groups of three. For the hadrons. All but identical. He called them aces. He told me he didnt think anyone else could figure this out and that he had all the time in the world to formalize it. He didnt know that Murray was on his trail and that he had less than a year. In the end Murray called the particles quarks—after a line in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, referring to cottage cheese. Three quarks for Muster Mark. And he swept the field and won the Nobel Prize and George went into therapy. But George came out the better for it.

This is a true story.



Thursday, December 1, 2022

the last book I ever read (The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy, excerpt three)

from The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy:

Best cheeseburger I ever ate was at the lunchcounter at Comer’s Pool Hall on Gay Street in Knoxville Tennessee. You couldnt get the grease off your fingers with gasoline. You still havent told me where you’re going.

Yeah, I know. We’re goin to Venezuela.