Finished reading: Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction by Brian Dillon 📚
Very short, compact, and good!
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Brian Dillon, Essayism:
“On Being Ill” concludes with a vision of Lady Waterford and her overactive husband, leaving the reader wondering how precisely Woolf has got us here:
Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and shewould wave to him and think each time, what if this should be the last?And so it was, that winter’s morning; his horse stumbled; he waskilled. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran downstairs on the day of the burial, the beauty of the great lady standing to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back, how the curtain, heavy, mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where she had grasped it in her agony.
I too have wondered what that was up to. A little nice to know so are a few others.
Currently reading: Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day 📚
Dorothy Day:
I had bought a small phonograph for a dollar down and a dollar a week, plunging at once into installement buying, that plague of the poor, that dishonesty by which the poor are robbed of their meager earnings
Here is Adorno in the fragment titled “Memento”:
A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it. Too close to his intention, “in his thoughts,”he forgets to say what he wants to say.
From Brian Dillons Essayism 📝📚
During a class, there’s the temptation to let your attention lapse and not make effort to understand a concept during the moment when it’s being taught as it seems so hard and taxing to get. So you promise yourself to revisit it personally. Or when you miss an online class hoping to watch the recording later. These are lies one must fight not to deceive himself with.
Today we were at Mbagathi County Referral Hospital, the third day of our ‘Child Health’ week. The discussion was on Nutrition. Mbagathi mostly serves people from Kibera and Rongai. That is, people from slums, with a very low socioeconomic status. That means access to health care is a challenge when they have to pay for it. The families of the malnourished children used to receive food baskets some time ago, but that was very long ago. Now, there’s the worry that they might end up selling the RUTF(Ready To Use Therapeutic Food) that is used to treat malnutrition just so to get money that perhaps can feed the entire household. Much effort ought to be made to make sure the most basic medical care is available for all patients despite socioeconomic status. But whose effort?
Witgensttein: “I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse’s good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.”
Me too, man.
Two reviews of Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary
For this year’s Girlfriends' Day, I wrote this article on my Substack
