Books and Ideas (35)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë.
Why read it? Novel. Somewhere I read that Emily Brontë disliked the controlled emotion and manners of Jane Austen’s novels, and set out to show that life is about passion. I do not know if this is true, but Wuthering Heights is certainly the opposite of the novels of Jane Austen. Wuthering Heights is about raw emotion, cruelty, vengeance and misanthropy. It is about anger, unbroken anger at the world and all the human beings in it. But it is also about a love that is passionate and unforgettable. Quite a mix.
Quote. Matthew Arnold: “For passion, vehemence and grief, she [Emily Brontë] has no equal since Byron.” Wuthering Heights was written a year before Emily Brontë died at age 29.
Quote. Heathcliff: “I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction.”
Quote: “For himself, he grew desperate; his sorrow was of that kind that will not lament; he neither wept nor prayed; he cursed and defied; execrated God and man….”
Quote. Catherine: “…he’s [Heathcliff] more myself than I am; whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning or frost from fire.”

The Years of the Forest. Helen Hoover.
Why read it? Reminiscent of Thoreau, wife and husband, writer and illustrator, live in the Minnesota woods. It was no vacation. The conditions were primitive. But she and her husband were able to be independent, to work out their destiny without being dependent on anyone or any thing. They had to make their own decisions. They knew the animals with whom they had a close relationship as individuals, not just as wildlife. They learned to live with nature, not to control it.
Quote: “To us the efforts of man to ‘conquer nature’ and so prove himself greater than the unity of which he is a part or superior to the forces that created him, seem not only dangerous and presumptuous, but stupid and silly.”
True love—the story of Mr. And Mrs. Twit, two injured juncos. When Mr. Twit recovered and was able to fly with the other birds, he did so. The Hoovers cared for Mrs. Twit with her injured wing over the winter. When spring came, the juncos returned, but one bird stayed apart—Mr. Twit. Mrs. Twit joyously joined him and they flew away together.
Quote: “I had already learned how to tell temperature by the feel of snow under my boots—soft and compressible around twenty degrees, crunching at zero, squeaking at ten to twenty below, crackling like small firecrackers at thirty below and colder.”
Quote: “First, we had not thought we were any more important than the flora and fauna around us; second, we had tried to leave as little trace of our passing over the earth’s surface as was possible.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Robert M. Pirsig.
Why read it? The author set out on a motorcycle vacation trip from Minnesota to California with his estranged teen-age son, Chris. It is actually a trip that retraces his career as a college teacher of writing before a mental breakdown. The ghost of “Phaedrus,” the person he was before his breakdown, is ever present. He is attempting to reconstruct what he was before his breakdown.
Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that asserts enlightenment can be attained through meditation, self-contemplation and intuition rather than through faith and devotion; practiced mainly in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Also called Zen Buddhism.
Quote: “Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class. Curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and lave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it is really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a large and frightening vacuum.”
Quote: “Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.”
Quote: “What the hell is quality?”