03.24 Reading Report
Books:
You cannot think through things that you cannot tolerate
This sentence from ordinary human failings has haunted me since I have finished the book. I like to believe it has subconsciously informed my choice to read “ crossroads” by Jonathan Frazen right after. “ Ordinary human failings” establishes the fact of the sentence above and “ Crossroads” demonstrates what this looks like in an average American family.
We are now in the middle of April and I have yet to stop thinking about the characters in these books. The themes were self delusion, self betrayal and all the other things we can do to our selves. We are following characters trying to exist and do more than let life happen to them. They share the desire to see themselves exist as they think of themselves. They fail often and try to wake up with some semblance of self respect to try again.
In “ Ordinary Human failings:, you see people trying to convince themselves that they are good and therefore deserving of good things. In the second, you see those convinced of their own goodness going mad trying to maintain this illusion. The key takeaway could be that goodness could never be the goal of a life. The embodiment of fundamental virtues seem incompatible with the abstract ideal of “goodness”.
I am not able to put into words everything I think about these two books. I feel immensely blessed to have come across them and of having read them in the order I did.
“ Ordinary human failings” by Megan Nolan:
In moments when lucidity threatened to overwhelm him and make him confront the situation, he reminder himself it may be dangerous to cause a pregnant woman stress. He taught himself to think only of reaching the end point of the baby’s birth…Instead dealt exclusively in the physical side effects of incessant denial which were constant and disgusting.
It hadn't become pronounced yet but she could feel the possibility that Lucy’s unreality to her was only the worst of a whole universe of unreal people she has dismissed, that at some point she may have to experience this same unveiling toward everyone, toward the world at large…She described the way her mind had split neatly in two between what really was, and what she was capable of tolerating, and how the false part had taken over and dominated the other for those months
Eventually she realized she would never out-think whatever it was she couldn’t tolerate in the haunted house
The sort of mad she had gone - which she knew now other women had and did too, she was not the only person in the world whose mind had disjointed in that particular way, knowledge which would provide unexpectedly enormous relief.
[People]who harboured private suspicions, and who would come to learn that, if they had, they could have spared somebody’s suffering, or even their whole life”
I am a good person and other people think so too.
“Crossroads” by Jonathan Frazen:
It was with a confusing sense of self betrayal of observing a person she morally disapproved of and, didn't understand, but nevertheless was…
She could turn off her self awareness and do bad things for the momentary gratification of them. The trick of dissociation was the beginning of her own illness, although she didn’t know it yet.
To see him as he really was and see herself as she really was, a lonely girl trading her body for a fantasy. Time was the enemy when she was alone, because the fantasy required effort to sustain and her strength was finite.
To have her even once seemed worth whatever price God might later make him pay
It was worth it, after all, to have aged thirty years. It was worth it to have taken the arduous steps to arrive in Bradley’s house, because the reward was clarity: God has given her a way of being.
I don’t deserve Joy! No one does. It is a gift from God.”
The vision of going to Europe and advancing Tanner’s career was too perfect to be defeated by reality. She didn’t see how she could give it up.
