all dogeared pages

the guy who writes this design blog I follow, Russell Davies, often reviews the books he's read by noting all the pages he dogeared. sometimes he photographs the pages, or scans them. these days he can simply post screenshots full of digital highlighting from his e-book reader, and that works.

me, I've just had to type things out. I think I like that better, anyway.

the book in question is The Kingdom of Ohio, by Matthew Flaming. it sort of surprisingly went along very well with the bits I was reading in Proust was a Neuroscientist about memory and identity and how we create reality in our own minds. all very interesting thoughts, framed in absorbing narratives.

{ picture borrowed from the vastness of the internet }

at the beginning of the novel, our unidentified narrator gets distracted every other chapter or so, and starts wondering aloud why he's telling this story now, after so much time has separated him from its bewildering events. he sounds extremely nostalgic, and despite his uncertainty, not confused at all about the story he sets out for us. his only worry is proving to us what truly happened. making it believable and acceptable to anyone outside himself. why does that matter so much?

"...I admit that although our private memories (like works of fiction) may endure without the agreement of anything outside themselves, at the moment when we try to make our recollections into stories the world begins to matter. By weaving memories into a sequence, they also become joined inextricably with time and history (which is to say, with the memories of everone else)." pg 31

how much do we as an audience need before we will suspend our disbelief? usually not very much. but how much before we set our disbelief down completely? how much evidence will it take before we start inhaling these stories as if they were true?

nothing really can be proven, at the bottom. my memories--your memories--they're all pretty fluid and malleable. put them all together and what do they do for us? they're just the world. just this place we exist as a part of.

experience is so subjective, and nobody else can tell me much about the things I see. there is so much that can't be put into words. or even if it can be put into words, is still almost impossible to really understand unless you've been there.

"Such sentences always end in silence, no matter how they may begin--indeed, this is the very essence of fate: that which we never quite manage to say." pg 109

and even when you have been there, right there where you know and feel and see and are... even then, does it make any sense? can our brains really encompass the hugeness of things as they really, deeply, truly are?

"None of this makes any sense, he thinks. And there's nothing--couldn't be anything, really--between us, at least beyond these moments. Still, at the same time, it comes to him that maybe love is always this way, a long-shot gamble: a bet against the odds that some intangible connection--even one as strange as this--will outweigh al the details and triviality of the world that drive people apart." pg231

and beyond that particular hugeness, the even more spectacular (and potentially terrifying) expanse of how things might be, could be, and will be in the future? how can anyone know those things? how can anyone even pretend to?

and yet we live. we make decisions, we take risks. we tell ourselves so many stories...

"If it were certain, it wouldn't be love." pg 300

and here's the part where I throw out some fancy-sounding words like ineffable and existential and quantum. maybe I should study more philosophy, instead of just rambling about it.