I've had an action packed day today: got a rare manicure-pedicure, took a
shitty swatch of my new polish, read news and was horrified by
PCP guy (srsly, WTF?), went to the grocery store to get ingredients for tomorrow's dinner, and made vanilla pudding. (Which was not from a box, thank you very much. I did the egg and cornstarch thing. Pics forecoming.) Now I'm going to chill and read more of
Doctor Faustus.
I've been keeping up with my goal of reading a shit ton this summer. I finished
Manhunt by James L. Swanson a couple days ago, which I thought was generally entertaining if somwhat judgy. I don't like it when my history books preach at me, as when they do it makes me feel like I'm being forced to agree with the author(s) and that usually makes me angy.
Manhunt presented a disturbingly romanticized picture of Booth and the people who helped him, which felt really icky to me. Others might feel differently.
After
Manhunt I began
Doctor Faustus, one of those monumental books which people feel like they
should read but usualy don't want
to read. Well, I held my breath, dove in, and was surprised by how much it engaged me from the first page. I'm still at the begining, but already I'm getting that tingly feeling that tells me a piece of literature is gonna rock my socks. In particular, I really liked the following passage, which talks about a certain mood present in Kaisersaschern in the early 20th century:
"But there hung in the air something of the state of the human heart during the last decades of the fifteenth century, a hysteria out of the dying Middle Ages, something of a latent psychological epidemic -- a strange thing to say about a sensibly practical, modern town. But it was not modern, it was old, and age is the past as the present, a past only veneered with the present; and this may sound bold, but one could imagine a Children's Crusade suddenly errupting there -- a Saint Vitus' dance, some utopian communistic lunatic preaching a bonfire of vanities, miracles, and visions of the Cross, and roving masses of mystic enthusiasts. That did not occur, of course -- how could it have?...Our own times are secretly inclined -- or, rather, anything but secretly, very purposefully in fact, with a particularly smug sense of purpose that leaves one doubting life's genuineness and simplicity and produces perhaps a very ill-fated historicity -- our times are inclined, I say, to return to such epochs and enthusiastically repeat symbolic actions that have something sinister about them, that strike in the face of modern understanding..."
Yes, yes, I know, TL;DR. But what's frightening about this is that he's talking about Nazi Germany and yet there is something very much like this "smug sense of purpose" present in American right now. Anti-intellectualism, anti-thought, anti-anything that makes people question themselves and their beliefs. It all makes me sick. Thanks,
Doctor Faustus, for articulating why.
