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Jan. 10th, 2006 08:44 pmI love revisiting old games and books, and lately I've been particularly nostalgic. This works well with my plan to read through all my books - or maybe it inspired it. Probably.
But what really drove me to get started was this:
In his introduction to Twelve Stories, Garcia Marquez mentions that these stories aquried form twenty years ago and then were left to brew. They were gradually forgotten and sprang to life again during his exile in Europe. The "geological" method of composition, typical of his style, highlights one outstanding incident and piles over it layers and layers of memory, achieveing a final effect with the realistic precision of the earth's crust.
It's from a translation of an article in A Memoir of Misfortune, an autobiography by Su Xiaokang. It's a library loan that I've held onto far too long - I should give it back, as soon as I've finished the other book I got with it, which would be a translation of Dante's Inferno. >.>
Reading this was a strange experiance. There are so many points where my heart ached, not for the author so much as for his wife and son. Yet I still felt... disconnected from it, like standing outside someone's window, or watching the wreck from across the highway. A witness to tragedy, yet not touched by it. The biggest cause of this, I think, is how aggravated I was with Xiaokang himself. He is incredibly clueless, inclined to float along the surface of life until something forces him underwater - or something comes out of the depths, usually in the form of a comment from his wife, that makes him aware for the hundreth time that there is more to her than he was aware of. This is a fact he acknowledges in the book, is something he seems to be working on, and yet it keeps happening. I suspect it will keep happening, for the rest of his life, because it's too intrinsic a part of his character. Floating like an insect on the waters of life.
It's about 4:22 and looking at that thought, it occurs to me finally who he reminds me of. In the book The Night Watch by Sean Stewart, there is a character very much like this. The same utter innocense of the depth of the world. The man's name is given as 'Water Spider'.
Continuing with the attempts to round up the nostalgic and re-examining thoughts I've been having - and I'll probably do this with at least half of what I read, if I manage to take my time and do all this properly? But - I had a thought about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. ( That scene in Voldemort's Cave of the Undead? )
And now I shall leave you with a wonderfully intelligent question! How come Barbie has a little sister, but no parents? >.>
But what really drove me to get started was this:
In his introduction to Twelve Stories, Garcia Marquez mentions that these stories aquried form twenty years ago and then were left to brew. They were gradually forgotten and sprang to life again during his exile in Europe. The "geological" method of composition, typical of his style, highlights one outstanding incident and piles over it layers and layers of memory, achieveing a final effect with the realistic precision of the earth's crust.
It's from a translation of an article in A Memoir of Misfortune, an autobiography by Su Xiaokang. It's a library loan that I've held onto far too long - I should give it back, as soon as I've finished the other book I got with it, which would be a translation of Dante's Inferno. >.>
Reading this was a strange experiance. There are so many points where my heart ached, not for the author so much as for his wife and son. Yet I still felt... disconnected from it, like standing outside someone's window, or watching the wreck from across the highway. A witness to tragedy, yet not touched by it. The biggest cause of this, I think, is how aggravated I was with Xiaokang himself. He is incredibly clueless, inclined to float along the surface of life until something forces him underwater - or something comes out of the depths, usually in the form of a comment from his wife, that makes him aware for the hundreth time that there is more to her than he was aware of. This is a fact he acknowledges in the book, is something he seems to be working on, and yet it keeps happening. I suspect it will keep happening, for the rest of his life, because it's too intrinsic a part of his character. Floating like an insect on the waters of life.
It's about 4:22 and looking at that thought, it occurs to me finally who he reminds me of. In the book The Night Watch by Sean Stewart, there is a character very much like this. The same utter innocense of the depth of the world. The man's name is given as 'Water Spider'.
Continuing with the attempts to round up the nostalgic and re-examining thoughts I've been having - and I'll probably do this with at least half of what I read, if I manage to take my time and do all this properly? But - I had a thought about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. ( That scene in Voldemort's Cave of the Undead? )
And now I shall leave you with a wonderfully intelligent question! How come Barbie has a little sister, but no parents? >.>
