memorable/synchronous reading moments:
read ‘rings of saturn’ on two flights (two funerals) to and from long beach to seattle. this passage after looking out the window at lakes that reflected clouds like they were holes in the earth leading to another earth or portals to another world, as we approached seatac:
‘No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pear, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, iti s as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extender their dominion by the hour…’
others: ‘bell jar’ at 17 in the bath, on painkillers after wisdom teeth extraction reading ‘the red and the black’ in a hotel on my first trip to france reading ‘last evenings on earth’ on amtrak going through kansas at night in the ‘viewing’ car full of boyscouts.
