History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Actrusesturn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification.
The Dry Salvages
The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
p. 130; lines 15-18
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation
The salt is on the briar rose,
p. 131; lines 26-27
The fog is in the fir trees.
The tolling bell
p. 131; end of section 1; lines 35-48
Measures time not our time
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future featureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.
It’s hard being left behind. […] Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him.(vii)
In some ways you were very parental.(9)
Clare picks up her purse and I shake my head at her. I pay.(13)
I offered to go Dutch but he [Jason Everleigh] said no, he never did that.(94)
I feel a tiny pang of regret, as though I’ve lost a secret, and then a rush of exaltation: now everything begins.(21)
Mr. Bear asks her about how it is being a movie star and she says she really wants to be a veterinarian but she is so incredibly pretty she has to be a movie star and Mr. Bear says maybe she could be a veterinarian when she’s old.(43)
we crowd into Mary Christina’s room that is decorated totally in pink, even the wall-to-wall carpet. You get the feeling Mary Christina’s parents were really glad to finally have a girl after all those brothers.(61)
in fairy tales it’s always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.(127)
I’m an extremely unusual grown-up. My job is to have adventures.(29)
Do you ever miss him?
she [Grandma Meagram] asks me.
Every day. Every minute.
Every minute,
she says. Yes. It’s that way, isn’t it?
(128)
Henry: I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn’t see anything but that blue. It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word.
(22)
I sat on the back porch in my pajamas with Mom and Dad and Mrs. and Mr. Kim, drinking lemonade and watching the blueness of the evening sky.
(25)
The streetlights tint the sky orange above me; it’s a deep cerulean blue over the lake.
(117)