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I like reading plays while traveling, the words don't crowd the page which is nice for reading in hectic places.
This one is about two lovers kept apart by their families, because the guy savagely beat the girl into a permanent state of brain damage, yet it becomes apparent that they’re still in love. It's a difficult story, I think I have an affinity for those.Â
Jan 17, 2025
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"Well, the pendulum swung today and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice’s. I thought of certain lines life had put on his face as personal as a line of his writing: I thought of a new scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man’s body from a falling wall. He didn’t tell me why he was in hospital those three days: Henry told me. That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy. And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity. But could my vapour love that scar? Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve."
simply perfection
Oct 30, 2024
I read this novella all in one sitting on the train to Bath, and I haven't been able to stop thing about it. Set in the 1920s, the main character is shellshocked WWI veteran who ventures into the British countryside to restore a mural in an old church. But it feels like more than an anti war novel, its about the end of summer, the passage of time and modernity, finding your place in a changing world. A Month in the Country is a celebration of brokenness — not the suffering of brokenness but, rather, the vulnerability that brokenness brings.
“We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.
All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.”
Mar 18, 2025
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Stuck overnight in the empty halls of John Lennon International airport, I read this a couple of times and drove myself effectively insane, having significant ramifications on the following months. Great story.
Dec 3, 2024
Top Recs from @elias-ronnenfelt
Unlike chess, which can leave you at the mercy of a 45 minute defeat with only your insufficient brain power to blame, backgammon has a nice and light pace to it. Rolling dice feels good and you can put the blame on them in hindsight.
I think board games like that are a great way to sit and spend time with people and be in each other's presence.
Jan 17, 2025
Probably the number one domestic activity I fantasize about when I’m on tour. There’s a groundedness to it that feels like the antithesis of road life. Cooking is often the first thing I do upon returning home.
Jan 17, 2025
One of the albums that I’ve listened to the most. I remember many years ago being on acid watching the sun rise from my window and listening to Scott 3 feeling like I was riding through every emotion on the record to the furthest possible extremes, it was overwhelming and magnificent. When it was over I looked at myself in the mirror and saw I had become an old man.
Jan 17, 2025