Nostromo: The Goulds

Gould's father's prohibition (79): "...never to return to Costaguana, never to claim any part of his inheritance there, because it was tainted by the infamous concession."

"A vague idea of rehabilitation had entered the plan of their life. That it was so vague as to elude the support of argument only made it the stronger. It had presented itself to them at the instant when the woman's instinct of devotion and the man's instinct of activity receive from the strongest of illusions their most powerful impulse"(92). Strongest of illusions=love in Conrad's schema.

Of Charles Gould: "Abandoned workings had for him strong fascination. Their desolation appealed to him like the sight of human misery, whose causes are varied and profound. They might have been worthless, but they also might have been misunderstood. His future wife was the first, and perhaps the only person to detect this secret mood which governed the profoundly sensible, almost voiceless attitude of this man towards the world of material things. And at once her delight in him, lingering with half-open wings like those birds that cannot rise easily from a flat level, found a pinnacle from which to soar up into the skies"(81).

"And when she wondered frankly that a man of character should devote his energies to plotting and intrigues, Charles would remark, with a gentle concern that understood her wonder, 'You must not forget that he was born there'"(82).

"His usual expression was unconditionally approving and attentive. He was in his talks with her the most anxious and deferential of dictators, an attitude that pleased her immensely. It affirmed her power without detracting from his dignity"(83).

"...his expression was tense and irrational, as is natural in a man who elects to stare at nothing past a young girl's head"(84).

"She had never before given him such a fascinating vision of herself. All the eagerness of youth for a strange life, for great distances, for a future in which there was an air of adventure, of combat- of subtle thought of redress and conquest-had filled her with an intense excitement, which she returned to the giver with a more open and exquisite display of tenderness"(85).

"Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates"(86).

"She could converse charmingly but  she was not talkative. The wisdom of the heart having no concern with the erection or demolition of theories any more than with the deference of prejudices, has no random words at its command. The words it pronounces have the value of acts of integrity, tolerance, and compassion. A woman's true tenderness, like the true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering kind"(87).

"...he contemplated her from the height of his long legs with a visible appreciation of her appearance. The consciousness of being thus contemplated pleased Mrs. Gould"(89).

"...marveling inwardly at the mobility of her physiognomy"(90)

"'I only wondered what you felt,' she murmured, gently.
During the last few days, as it happened, Charles Gould had been kept far too busy thinking twice before he spoke to have paid much attention to the state of his feelings. But theirs was a successful match, and he had no difficulty in finding his answer.
'The best of my feelings are in your keeping, my dear,' he said lightly; and there was so much truth in that obscure phrase that he experienced towards her at the moment a great increase of gratitude and tenderness"(90-91).

Notes from Conrad's Nostromo

Penguin edition edited by Martin Seymour-Smith (1983, 10th printing)
lines, phrases I loved-

"He had found no need to drop his voice; it had been low all the time, a mere murmur in the silence of dark houses with their shutters closed early against the night air, as is the custom of Sulaco"(178).

Decoud: "I have only the supreme illusion of a love"(179).

Decoud about Nostromo: "He is a fortunate fellow! His work is an exercise of personal powers; his leisure is spent in receiving the marks of extraordinary adulation"(181).

"It seemed to him [Decoud] that every conviction, as soon as it became effective, turned into that form of dementia the gods send upon those they wish to destroy"(188).

"It was part of what Decoud would have called his sane materialism that he did not believe in the possibility of friendship between man and woman.

The one exception he allowed confirmed, he maintained, that absolute rule. Friendship was possible between brother and sister,  meaning by friendship the frank unreserved, as before another human being, of thoughts and sensations; all the objectless and necessary sincerity of one's innermost life tryint to react upon the profound sympathies of another existence"(205).

Reading Lore Segal's Ladies Lunch on a lunch break on Sassafrass Mountain

"The five women have grown old coming together, every other month or so for the last thirty or more years, around one another'story table."

Not table for lunch. Nobody. Me, a banana, a Hershey bar and a bottle of water. And, the wind nearly unimpeded.

Coy fiction

Curtis Sittenfield interviewed in the New Yorker online about her story "The Prarie Wife":
"The kind of fiction I like to read and write is very specific and detailed about everything—settings, moods, smells, textures—so to me it's kind of silly or coy not to apply that specificity and detail to sex, and I don't see the point of coy fiction. Therefore, I write the scenes that I think serve a particular story or novel, and in the moment of writing, I sort of exist in a parallel universe and don't consider what, say, my uncle or my former co-worker might think of my description of a blow job."