Week #14: Passion For Pity, And Other Recipes For Disaster

Nothing in particular. Still reading Danielewski's "House of Leaves," which is turning out to be one seriously difficult book. It's not uncommon for it to slow me to three or four (and never more than 15 or so) pages per day. I can't recommend this thing to anyone, because the density of this sort of writing and the often extreme exercise in semiotics required of the reader (never mind following alternate time-flows and parallel stories that often as not rabbit-trail to dead ends) is an acquired (and not very often acquired, at that) taste. Most people I know (including, probably, you) would hate every one of the dense, 710 pages.

But I like it.

At any rate, I ran across a quote that just rang me like crystal tapped by a tuning fork tonight. It might just be telling me something about reading this damned book.  But it feels more universally applicable.

You ever have one of those moments in which you heard/read/saw/was told something that hadn't really occurred to you, but the instant you found it you realized you always knew it? Yeah. One of those.

"Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer."

Yup.

Back in a day or two with a real post. Got an anniversary coming up tomorrow that I ought to acknowledge, so there's that. Probably some other stuff.