View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Akaky Akakievich thought and thought, and decided that he would have to reduce his usual expenses for at least one year: to banish the drinking of tea in the evenings, not to light candles in the evenings, and if he needed to do something, to go to the landlady’s room and work by the light of her little candle; as he walked along the street, to step as lightly and carefully as he could along the cobblestones and flagstones, almost on tiptoe, so as not to wear out his soles too fast; to give his linen to the laundress as rarely as possible, and so as not to wear it out, to take it off as soon as he came home and remain in just a thick cotton robe that was very old and had been spared by time itself. One must speak the truth and say that at first it was rather difficult for him to get used to such limitations, but then it seemed to become a habit and things got better. He even got accustomed to going hungry in the evenings; but to make up for it he was nourished spiritually, bearing in his thoughts the eternal idea of the future overcoat. From that time it was as if his very existence became somehow fuller, as if he had gotten married, as if some other person was present with him, as if he was not alone, but a pleasant female life companion had agreed to follow life’s path along with him—and that companion was none other than the thickly padded overcoat with a strong lining showing no trace of wear.
:'(
Is it possible that despite discoveries and progress, despite culture, religion and world-wisdom, one has remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that one has even covered this surface, which might still have been something, with an incredibly uninteresting stuff which makes it look like the drawing-room furniture during summer holidays?
Yes, it is possible.
this pattern gets kind of annoying but i like that phrase
[...] On his way to the damsel Hilleborg Krafse, he dreamed he was given a naked sword instead of his bride, and he took it to heart and turned back and began his brief and foolhardy life, which ended with the plague. [...]
lol
Nothing whatever had been agreed upon between us, but when the carriage turned into the park I could not refrain from getting out, perhaps simply because I did not want to drive up to the house like any stranger. Summer was already at its height. I headed into one of the side paths and toward a laburnum tree. And there was Abelone. Beautiful, beautiful Abelone.
I shall never forget how it was when you looked at me. How you wore that gaze of yours, holding it up, like something that was not fixed, upon your back-tilted face.
Ah, did not the climate change at all, did it not grow milder round about Ulsgaard with all our warmth? Do not certain roses bloom longer in the park now, even in December?
I shall tell nothing about you, Abelone. Not because we deluded one another: since you loved someone, even then, whom you have never forgotten, you lover, and I loved all women; but because only wrong is done in the telling.
<3
[...] You felt how your heart intensified unceasingly toward an immense reality and, frightened, you tried once more to take people's gaze off you like long gossamer threads --: but now, in their fear of the worst, they were already breaking into applause: as though at the last moment to ward off something that would compel them to change their life.
As he thinks this, the recluse in his night, thinks it and understands, he notices a plate with fruit on the window-seat. Involuntarily he takes an apple from it and lays it before him on the table. How my life stands round about this fruit, he thinks. Around all that is finished that which has still to be done rises and takes increase.
Here he rises from his meditations and goes to his window; his high room is too close to him, he would like to see stars, if that is possible. He has no delusions about himself. He knows that this emotion fills him because among the young girls of his neighborhood there is one who matters to him. He has wishes (not for himself, no, but for her); on her account he understands, in a nocturnal hour that is passing, the exigence of love. He promises himself to tell her nothing of it. It seems to him the utmost he can do is to be alone and wakeful and on her account to think how right that lover had been: when she knew that nothing can be meant by union save increased loneliness; when she broke through the temporal aim of sex with its infinite purpose; when in the darkness of embracing she delved not for satisfaction but for longing. When she disdained one of two being the lover and one beloved, and at her own self kindled to lovers that left her those feeble beloved ones whom she bore to her couch. By such lofty farewells her heart became part of nature. Above fate she sang her last year's favorites their epithalamia; exalted their nuptials for them; magnified the coming bridegroom, so that they should prepare themselves for him as for a god and survive his splendor, too.
i dont totally get this but it is pretty!
What's not in this book is a roundup of the Valley's Most Important People [...] The Valley is about the opportunity to become a mover or a shaker, not about being one. That opportunity is what gets young people to move here every day from Illinois and India and Canada.
this is interesting cus i think this is part of the myth of sv even tho it's clearly wrong about the way things actually are
[...] He is twenty-seven and has an MBA from the University of Tennessee and wants to build the technology that changes how the world lives and works. I don't hear this kind of idealism very often anymore; it's like Scott's time traveled here from 1994. It's a plain vanilla idealism, perhaps the sort of unironical viewpoint that can only develop in the heartland of the country -- where they know absolutely nothing about what it's really like here. I give it three months, and then, like an accent, it'll disappear.
lol
Silicon Valley today: Get lean, get stripped down, live on nothing. Bare bones. Focus. Be a fighter. Stamina. Ration yourself to one Snickers bar, one jacking off, and one Dilbert cartoon daily. Forget about love that nourishes. Forget about food that satiates. Forget about long conversations that get good only late in the middle of the night, when the third bottle of wine is uncorked. Forget about poetry: the whisper, the leaf, the tuck of hair. Forget about politics: the bilingual ed revolt, the dams diverting more water south.
Get ready for ultracapitalism.
"No, when I make my first twenty million, forget about it," says Thierry.
"Forget about it?" I ask.
"No, forget about it."
"You won't be here?"
"No, I'll go home. Maybe here in small doses only. Those people you write about -- they make twenty million, and it is not enough for them. I am not greedy like them."
lol