Commonplace Book
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Thomas Buddenbrook in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, meditating on the irritations of growing old: “We’re only as young or old as we feel. And when something good we’ve longed for finally does come along, it lumbers in a little too late somehow, loaded down with petty, annoying, upsetting details, covered with all the grime of reality
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Richard Grannison in Raymond Postgate’s Somebody at the Door soliloquises about afternoons: “Afternoons are the time for seduction. Anatole France proved it long ago … “Consider the whole question in the light of reason … The conventional night out. What does it mean? Why, creeping home about five in the morning, very tired and uncomfortable,
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The joy of research, as described in Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s The Rabbit Back Literature Society: What joy is there in research, anyway? someone had once asked in one of her methodology courses. The teaching assistant’s answer had made an impression on Ella at the time: Research brings order to the world. It makes things clearer,
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Very good advice on editing from “Mrs Hawkins” in Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington: ‘When you are editing copy, Mrs Hawkins, what sort of things do you look for?’ said Howard Send. ‘Exclamation marks and italics used for emphasis,’ I said. ‘And I take them out.’ It was as good an answer as
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From Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios: Only a few men, painters, have been able to see the mind through the face. Other men in their judgements reach out for the evidence of word and deed that will explain the mask before their eyes. Yet, though they understand instinctively that the mask cannot be the
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A precise, and concise, description from Joseph Roth, in The Radetzky March, of how it feels to be drunk: Lieutenant Trotta did not budge. He could remember that his father had recently arrived, and he understood that it wasn’t this father, but a whole bunch of fathers that were standing in front of him. But
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I’ve never been a drug addict myself (I’m glad to say) but this description of addiction from Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios paints a very convincing picture of how addiction can take hold: The process is always roughly the same. It begins as an experiment. Half a gramme, perhaps, is taken through the nostrils.
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This definition of doublethink from George Orwell’s 1984 is horrifyingly resonant in 2020 UK: To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic,
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I find this advice from John Kay’s Obliquity very useful: When faced with a task that daunts you, a project that you find difficult, begin by doing something. Choose a small component that seems potentially relevant to the task. While it seems to make sense to plan everything before you start, mostly you can’t: objectives
Virginia Rounding: Author, editor, proofreader, indexer 