Quiet Passion

"Dixon was alive again.  Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection.  He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.  The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.  A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse.  His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.  During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police.  He felt bad"--Lucky Jim

"The mother had wished to prevent the father from, as she said, 'so much as looking' at the child; the father's plea was that the mother's lightest touch was 'simply contamination.' These were the opposed principles in which Maisie was to be educated—she was to fit them together as she might. Nothing could have been more touching at first than her failure to suspect the ordeal that awaited her little unspotted soul. There were persons horrified to think what those in charge of it would combine to try to make of it: no one could conceive in advance that they would be able to make nothing ill"--What Maisie Knew

On Monday (I think) we had to carry out dozens of buckets of water that had accumulated in our new cellar so John could work on the plumbing for our new shower there.

I finished the book about Afghanistan history so now I can focus on finishing Lucky Jim.

Thursday my History Meetup discussed Afghanistan.  The following night the watch party showed John Huston's movie of Rudyard Kipling's Afghanistan-related story The Man Who Would Be King (which I'd read earlier in the week).  I'd seen the movie before but forgotten how good it was!  Sean Connery and Michael Caine have perfect chemistry.

Tonight I attended the Quiet Passion Literature Meetup through zoom.com . We read out loud the first pages of Henry James' What Maisie Knew.  It was fun. (We may do D.H. Lawrence or Edith Wharton next week.)