"Doctor, sir, you shouldn't have! You really shouldn't have!" What has the doctor done? Story is kept elliptical, but converging with I + P. The doctor is hauled onto the "thoroughly wet straw" behind the seat of a cart. We head to the town of Elek for reasons unknown. 2/2 #mud #Satantangotogether
I +P (and boy) emerge: "The doctor watched the light's ruthless progress across the field, his spirit broken but still nursing some vague hope...He recognized them...These two big-time rogues, people he though were dead, right in front of him." 1/2 p 75 #Satantangotogether
Sneaking suspicions... In a notebook labeled MRS. KRANER, the doctor writes: "K. resigned... She had no problem walking in the rain last spring. She is up to no good...What the devil is it?" He heads out to replenish pálinka, the first great rain of the season pelts down. p 63 #Satantangotogether
Or, will all be sunk in mud, as foreshdwed on the first sentence, p 3 "stinking yellow sea of mud... render footpaths impassable.." NB: p. 58, "His imagination was bewitched.." Will more pálinka, like mescal in Lowry's Under the Volcano, make Dr. Benda's world more "solid"? 2/2 #Satantangotogether💙
After 3 slugs of pálinka, funny trope of black cat, and incymi "What the hell is a cat doing here?", on p 58 we learn Dr. Benda has been reading the history of the earth, author unknown. Is he "reading a work of prophesy regarding the earth's condition...or a proper work of geographic history." 1/2
The doctor seems drawn as an allegory of horror, humanity becoming petrified, paranoid and doing little but watching, from his "accursed corner of the estate"? "Probably a pathological love of order..." Then p 55, "a system some people might consider insane." Hellish and hell. #Satantangotogether
I + P resolve to go to the estate. The boy, follows like a shadow. Last sentence signals another bleak day to come: "...the sun, like a beggar daily panting up to his spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery...the darkness still in flight at the edge of things..." #Satantangotogether
Recalls dark, fearful waiting, p 14 "...objects washed into each other during the agonizing wait, the pans by the wall coming to life along with the icons and it even seemed there was someone in the bed. They hoped to escape these hallucinatory visions by stealing glances at one another.." (3/3) 💙
"No, it is a person after all. Could it be that old bat by the toilets? Or that asshole over there in the gym shoes? What is this? Some kind of dissent?" Then it suddenly stops. Now there's only the silence, the suspicious glances." (2/3)
Confused, fearful, and unstable #satantangotogether p38: "Irimiás raises his glass then then slowly puts it down again. 'Is someone humming here?' he mutters in irritation. "Is someone making a joke?! What the hell is it? A machine? Or, or might it be...the lamps?..." 1/3
💙 #satantangotogether
Thank you! Yes, especially love the majestic, effervescent, dramatic and wide ranging world of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2! also No. 11, which seems to fit better the mood of these first pages of #Satantangotogether...
& more noir, sur-reality, captain "replaced by a new nose, new bones, new wrinkles that wipe away all memory...to preserve in a single mass everything which, years from now, will find itself interred six feet under." echoes p12, death motif, Futaki's deathly reflection of his face in a window. 🖤
More strangeness, e.g. Irimiás "loping," Petrina, "like a snake." & wildly, captain appears: "as if he were covered in armor;... swallowing light, some secret power is entering his skin; the decay resurrected from the cavity of the bones, liberated, is filling every cell of his body..." p 36
"People are satisfied. That's just how it should be. But if they read the papers properly they would know that there is a real crisis out there. We are not going to allow that crisis to hem us in and destroy all we have achieved!" Seems captain will oppress, obfuscate... (2/2) #Satantangotogether
Still going in circles, the captain relents first: "I've had enough of the Irimiás-Petrina duo. I am fed up with creatures like you, miserable dogs who think I am answerable to them!" And Irimiás "Captain, you know us. Why can't things remain as they were?" What was that? (1/2) p 35
Also, NB: ominous "door Number Twenty-Four"... opening of chapter 2 is very elliptical; have no idea what "the shadow of suspicion is about"... though the matter is characterized as a "ridiculous misunderstanding.." p 21 #satantangotogether
arrive at an absurd, hilarious, confused state of affairs when captain questions Petrina and Irimias -- "How did you get here!? Have you any idea what this office deals with?!" Both men shake their heads feeling weak. "This is the RP Section--Registry of Prostitutes..." p 28 #satantangotogether
Then Mrs. Halics comes to the door reporting to Mrs. Schmidt that Irimias and Petrina, who have been dead 18 months, were on their way to the estate... The account is confused, perhaps some unnamed "kid" simply lied. Mr. Schmidt thinks this is a trap, and Futaki believes Irimias is a magician. (2/2)
Madness? e.g. p 13 ..."suddenly a vague form appeared at the window...a human face.." And Futaki realizes this is his own face; "what the rain was doing to his face was exactly what time would do. It would wash it away." And then remembered "the bells tolling at dawn..." (1/2) #Satantangotogether
"...and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away, only, eventually, to deliver himself-- utterly naked, without identifying mark... " see p 4 for con't of passage anticipating book's plunge into the human condition. #Satantango 🖤(4/4)
"a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity..." Right at the outset, this introduces urgency, dark pov driving the book, which leads into iconography, image of coffin... (3/4)
Also, no paragraph or line breaks -- one long sequence. Then we get this leap on p 4 "suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater space of eternity..." (2/4)
Opening sentence includes foreshadowing, whispering a secret "(later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impossible and put the town too beyond reach)." And then sounds of bells, eg, pg 3 "Futaki woke to hear bells..."now ever fainter bell sound... then p 5 "ghostly bells." (1/4)
“downed like a rooster, his wings hanging miserably in the battle. It really is a god who can, at one sight of his loveliness, break our courage this way and force down our pride do thoroughly…” He toyed and skirmished with his emotions, far too haughty to be afraid of them.” #DeathinVenice 💙
of dissolution and weakness. He was embarrassed, as he feared that someone or other, if only the guard on the beach, must have observed his pursuit and defeat. He was very much afraid of the ridiculous. Further, he joked with himself about his comically pious distress. “Downed,” he thought (2/3)
“Aschenbach was no longer given to self-criticism. His tastes, the mental caliber of his years, his self-respect, ripeness, and a belated simplicity made him unwilling to dismember his motives and to debate whether his impulses were the result of conscientiousness or... (1/3) #DeathinVenice #TMann💙
Moved by this gorgeous poem by Wendell Berry🩵"...I come into the peace of wild things..." Thank you @ddgmns💙https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/peace-wild-things-0/
“I too still wept when I became once again for a moment the former friend of Albertine. But it was into a new personality that I was tending to change altogether. It is not because other people are dead that our affections for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying.” p805Proust#TheFugitive
preferred mere assertions by Albertine. Why had I believed them? Lying is essential to humanity.…One lies all one’s life long,even, especially,perhaps only, to those who love one. For they alone make us fear for our pleasure and [make us] desire their esteem.” p 824 #Proust #TheFugitive
