I couldn't help it.

A passage from The Quiet American. Recorded mostly for my own benefit and convenience. (But still worth reading nonetheless!)

"'Have you had a lot of women, Fowler?'
'I don't know what a lot means. Not more than four women have had any importance to me--or me to them. The other forty-odd--one wonders why one does it. A notion of hygiene, of one's social obligations, both mistaken.'
'You think they are mistaken?'
'I wish I could have those nights back. I'm still in love, Pyle, and I'm a wasting asset. Oh, and there was pride of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted, too.'
'You don't think there is anything wrong of me, do you Thomas?'
'No, Pyle.'
'It doesn't mean I don't need it, Thomas, like everybody else. I'm not--odd.'
'Not one of us needs it as much as we say. There's an awful lot of self-hypnosis around. Now I know I need nobody--except Phuong. But that's a thing one learns with time. I could go a year without one restless night if she wasn't there...One starts promiscuous and ends like one's grandfather, faithful to one woman.'
'I suppose it's pretty naive to start that way . . .'
'No.'
'...You know, Thomas, it's pretty good being here, talking to you like this. Somehow it doesn't seem dangerous any more.'
'We used to feel that in the blitz,' I said, 'when a lull came. But they always returned.'
'If somebody asked you what your deepest sexual experience had been, what would you say?'
I knew the answer to that. 'Lying in bed early one morning and watching a woman in a red dressing-gown brush her hair.'
'Joe said it was being in bed with a Chink and a negress at the same time.'
'I'd have thought that one up too when I was twenty.'
'He's fifty.'
'I wonder what mental age they gave him in the war.'
'Was Phuong the girl in the red dressing-gown?'
I wished he hadn't asked that question.
'No,' I said, 'that woman came earlier. When I left my wife.'
'What happened?'
'I left her, too.'
'Why?'
Why indeed? 'We are fools,' I said, 'when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing--I don't know if she really was, but I couldn't bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran towards the finish just like a coward runs towards the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over.'
'Death?'
'It was a kind of death. Then I came east.'
'And found Phuong?'
'Yes.'"


There's quite more to their conversation, in a watch tower one night with two young guards, where they sit hoping the Vietmihn don't try to attack their particular tower as they sit there essentially weaponless. Including Pyle subtlely and sulkily accusing Fowler of not loving Phuong, having been with 40+ women, because of his understanding of the way the young Vietnamese girl "loves." And a discussion of what it means to be a virgin. It's really interesting. I like the simple, straightforward sincerity of it. Old English Fowler, young American Pyle, both stuck in a watch tower and in love with the same Vietnamese woman.

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Now playing: Straylight Run - The Perfect Ending

'The Quiet American' by Graham Greene.

“Death takes away vanity—even the vanity of the cuckold who mustn’t show his pain.”

“...From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had always longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness... Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would no longer be the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.”

"It is odd how reassuring conversation is, especially on abstract subjects: it seems to normalize the strangest surroundings."

All of those are Thomas Fowler, the narrator of the book. I'm enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would, given that it's for 20th Century American Foreign Policy, my hell course this semester. I'm particularly enjoying the contrast between the characters - Fowler's older, experienced, worldly, and hard. Emotionally he's restrained to a crippling point, and he knows it. And then you have his view of the eponymous Alden Pyle, a young innocent man whose idealistic visions and impossible standards haven't yet crumbled. Set in Vietnam in 1955, I think it is, it's very interesting. They're vying for the heart of the same girl, Phuong (whose name means "phoenix"), in very detached ways - the love that all three involved feel is really interesting.

On a completely separate note, I just remembered something I wanted to mention. I've been listening (almost obsessively, really) to a bunch of songs by Chris Ayer and Ingrid Michaelson lately. I love the Ingrid Michaelson ones for their lyrics, but also for how different they are, musically, from a lot of stuff I usually hear. I love Chris Ayer's stuff for his lyrics and his simple, folksy music - really, though, his lyrics are amazing. The guy can write a song. And sing it in a manner where you can understand everything he's saying. AND he can write a good tune that's not about love, which is wonderfully refreshing. To me, at least. But yeah. That's what I wanted to note: a great relatively unknown singer/songwriter who writes touching songs that aren't all about love.

That's all.

Un poème.

mouths open

gasp for air

bright eyes tear

breath reeks

( parmesan cheese )

( garlicky cold pizza )

exhaling melody

...

livejournal

On a completely separate note, I really hate 1) the Optimum online commercial, the one on the beach with the mermaids...you know which one I'm talking about... and 2) the freecreditreport.com commercial with the guys in the car. They're effing obnoxious and I now even more deeply resent the advertising/marketing industry because of them.

Life:

a cup drawn to your lips
filled sweetly but with a drop of bitterness
or a bitter drink with but a drop of sweetness?

what do you taste?

Inspired by: 'Not Quite What I was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure'

I try but don't know how.

I always look better on paper.

Hahaha. I'm going to keep adding to this as I think of more. Care to share if you come up with any yourself. : D

Life is . . . funny. Really fucking funny.

I used to know me. Now . . . ?

To live by revelation = a gift.

Time is not on our side.