This Side of Paradise

My book club met yesterday to talk about our second book, "This Side of Paradise." I had to make a monumental effort, even for me, to finish it, since I started it Monday night and had only read 53 pages (of 282) by the time I left work yesterday afternoon. So I read like mad and finished it in time for the meeting. I reviewed it on GoodReads, so I won't belabor my review here, but I wanted to pull out one of the exceptional quotes from it. (There were quite a few, but this one is the most alluring.) I'm filled with dreams of floating this week... only a few more days until I'll be floating myself in the ocean.

Often they swam and as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut his mind to all thoughts except those of hazy soap-bubble lands where the sun splattered through wind-drunk trees. How could anyone possibly think or worry, or do anything except splash and dive and loll there on the edge of time while the flower months failed. Let the days move over - sadness and memory and pain recurred outside, and here, once more, before he went on to meet them he wanted to drift and be young.

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tell it

"Over the mysteries of female life there is drawn a veil, best left undisturbed."

--Mr Brooke, Little Women (the movie)

A manifestation of the will to quote things...

"I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray."

"On the way out again, I suddenly saw everything clearly: Sigmund Freud painting cocaine onto his septum, the rising uproar of the past hour and a half, the idling Audi full of rash behavior that lay ahead, the detonating summer; and because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second."

"I felt another of those sudden onslaughts of love, the desire to run to them and embrace them both, to be seen in their company, to live my life among men and women who dressed up like this and then went down the sidewalk like cinema kings."

"This bar was esteemed for the quality or at least the profusion of the graffiti in both its gentlemen's ad ladies' rooms, which were rarely washed or repainted. I read this exhange:
WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT WOMEN, ANYWAY?
And, lower:
HEY, EVERY WOMAN, PAL, IS A VOLUME OF STORIES A CATALOGUE OF MOVEMENTS A SPECTACULAR ARRAY OF IMAGES
Then:
PLUS THERE'S THE MYSTERY OF LEARNING ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD
A fourth man had concluded:
AND OF EVERYTHING THAT'S CONCEALED UNDER HER CLOTHES"

"That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver's head.
'Hey, bus driver,' I said. 'Can I smoke?'
'May I,' said the bus driver.
'I love you,' I said."

"How about 'a manifestation of the will-to-bigness.' "

"When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness -- and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything."

--The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

"It is the fever of life, the consuming desire to live intensely, to create something strong and great, to understand all things, to possess every knowledge and every experience, to do and to be giant. I want to be everywhere at once. I want to read more, to see more people, to be more alone with nature, to write more. In the middle of a small task, I rebel - the fever takes hold of me and I am blinded by illimitable visions of greater things to be done. I want to be at the heights of life every moment, to penetrate the past and to divine the future."

-Anais Nin

Good quote

Actually, you know what? I'm still not all that clear on what's involved in doing sweet, ordinary boyfriend-girlfriend things. I just assume it's a lot of making out and groping in public, sex in cars, blow jobs in public restrooms, going to movies, eating at restaurants listening to the radio, arguing about trivia, and--what else? Do you help each other with your homework? Play Scrabble, build models, buy food at the grocery store and cook it for each other, meet at the Rec. Center or at th ebeach for a game of volleyball with her Nair-commercial friends? Does she ask you which dress makes her look fatter, like Carol does with Little Big Tom? Does she throw a stapler at you and stop talking to you for days when you can't figure out the right answer? Do you share your secrets and deepest fears with one another, or are those subjects still just as weird and awkward and best not brought up, maybe even especially to someone to whom you are constantly, incessantly, relentlessly giving the time?

I only mention it because I have this idea, a dream, really, that part of what it would mean is that the boyfriend is in this little club with the girlfriend where when one is hurt or troubled or being assailed by the cruelties of the world, the other decides not to be on the side of the world, but to join forces with the other member of the club against the world, even if it's frowned upon, even if it's a doomed scenario, even if the world is definitely gonna win. Like you're allies. The last remnant of your people. A Sex Alliance Against Society. But maybe I have it all wrong. It does sound like a quaint, far-fetched idea, now that I've put it into words. And also overly dramatic, if something can be o. d. and q. at the same time.

-King Dork