A couple of lines from a book I'm reading

I've been traveling the last couple of days for work. A day in Charlotte, NC and the rest of the week I'll be down here in Georgia in a little town outside of Atlanta called Peachtree City.

Over the weekend, we headed somewhere, shopping, I think, and I had to hurry and pick out a book to read. This is what I do when there are long stretches of familiar road or I am waiting in the car while Jocelyn and Monica are in a store like Bath & Body Works. Funnily enough, Gabe has been bitten by the reading bug, too. He is reading for fun! When he isn't on the Wii. We've got to talk about this Wii thing in another post.

Anyway, I couldn't grab my current non-fiction books because they are just too heavy. So is the Calvin & Hobbes collection. I'm between novels, so I grabbed an old paperback that I bought years ago and have never read. (I buy books at used book stores. This book is an old mass market paperback that cost me less than a dollar.)

It has been superb. The book, and you might have already read it, is by Iris Murdoch. It is her first novel, published in 1954, titled Under the Net. The novel is about a writer, well, a would be writer, he mostly does translations because he can't focus on his own ideas, who doesn't want to do "real" work and would prefer to live a leisurely life of instrospection and artistic endeavor. He and I have a bit in common (but we're not exactly alike.)

Anyway, I'll let you read the book when you're good and ready to do so.

In the meantime, I have two quotes that I want to share with you. The book is full of quotable passages. I'm in love with this novel...yet if any novel is pretty and challenging, I'll fall for it. I'm easy that way.

Here are the quotes--they take place in the same chapter, only a couple of pages apart:

1) "...to find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love..."

I like that. The other person always seems fresh and new, he or she always has at least one element of mystery, and you never cease in your wonder and curiosity. Isn't that the opposite of familiarity and indifference? I'm going to write a love song that uses the word inexhaustible.

2) "The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction."

This is my fundamental issue with blogging. I feel like I desparately need to write. And to write well, I believe that one has to be authentic. And to be authentic, even in imaginative work, one has to pull truths out of themselves. That is the tough part of writing.

That is the tough part of intimacy.

I think it is the tough part of being fully human.

On that deep thought, I'm turning in. Class starts early tomorrow.