"Dear Life"

[fiefoe]

Alice Munro's sheer mastery of the medium made her stories enjoyable to read, but I don't think I will take on that much grimness again. Her version of life is so far from "a resplendent brocade robe crawling with fleas." "Dolly" is the only basically upbeat one; "Train" the shaggiest tale.

• His opinions were something like his complexion. When they went to see a movie, he never wanted to talk about it afterwards. He would say that it was good, or pretty good, or okay. He didn’t see the point in going further.
• an engineers’ party, the atmosphere was pleasant though the talk was boring. That was because everybody had their importance fixed settled at least for the time being. Here nobody was safe. Judgment might be passed behind backs, even on the known and published. An air of cleverness or nerves obtained, no matter who you were.
• drearily typical /  A clear break in the weather, an access of boldness
• Greta was hoping that he wasn’t one of those adults who make friends with children mostly to test their own charms, then grow bored and grumpy when they realize how tireless a child’s affections can be.
• eyes had been oddly without expression and her mouth just hanging open, in the moment before the fact of rescue struck her and she could begin to cry. Only then could she retrieve her world, her right to suffer and complain.
• her attention had been spasmodic, her tenderness often tactical. ("To Reach Japan")
• It was just that whatever happened in places they didn’t know or to people they didn’t know or in times they didn’t know had to be discounted. It got in their way and under their skin.
• The building, the trees, the lake, could never again be the same to me as they were on that first day, when I was caught by their mystery and authority.
• There was a bleak but orderly look to the place, a suggestion of minimal but precise comfort, that a lone man—a regulated lone man—might contrive.
• And he’d ask Anabel what makes it so heavy what did you have to eat for breakfast, but she never told. If there was other kids I wouldn’t do it. It was best when just me and Anabel went. She was the best friend I ever will have.
• be drawing all ordinary comfort out of the situation and replacing it with a pleasure that was tight and nerve-racking rather than expansive.
• No matter what he said and meant, he spoke out of the same deep place then, that he spoke from when he was in bed with me. But it is not so now, after he has spoken to another man. He rolls up the window and gives his attention to the car, to backing it out of its tight spot. ("Admundsen")


• She would not have forgotten. Just tidied up the scene and put it away in a closet with her former selves.
• That girl had grown up to preen and bargain like the rest of them. The waste of time, the waste of life, by people all scrambling for excitement and paying no attention to anything that mattered.
• What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.
• I went down the lane myself but did not tell anyone. All the eviscerating that is done in families these days strikes me as a mistake. / corner of their mother’s attention.
• Of course it took all a woman’s energy to keep up such a haven as this.
• She was right, both about my acquiring a few friends and about the way that that would limit the things I could do.
• And they were at that stage of taking on a new community, where every prospect looks bright and easy.
• Devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous.
• The problem is one of space and bodies. With the choir in the aisle, there is no way for Uncle Jasper to get back to our pew. He is stranded. ("Haven")
• I had a very strange feeling that was part horror and part—as near as I can describe it—a kind of chilly exhilaration. The blowing away of everything, the equality—I have to say it—the equality, all of a sudden, of people like me and worse than me and people like them. Of course this feeling vanished when I got used to seeing things, later in the war. Naked healthy buttocks, thin old buttocks, all of them being herded into the gas chambers.
• There was still that strange hesitation and lightness about her, as if she were waiting for life to begin.
• She said, “Skunks. Little skunks. More white in them than black.” But how beautiful. Flashing and dancing and never getting in each other’s way, so you could not tell how many there were, where each body started or stopped.
• Still, she liked to wear it on certain occasions, like that dinner party, to hold her own, it seemed, even with people whom she had no use for.
• She gets up and quickly dresses and walks through every room in the house, introducing the walls and the furniture to this new idea. A cavity everywhere, most notably in her chest. She makes coffee and doesn’t drink it. She ends up in her bedroom once more, and finds that the introduction to the current reality has to be done all over. ("Corrie")
• Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation. You roused your body, readied your knees, to enter a different block of air. You looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train.
• They were written in the past. What puzzled him, though he didn’t intend to let on, was why anybody would want to sit down and do another one, in the present. Now.
• Things could be locked up, it only took some determination. When he was as young as six or seven he had locked up his stepmother’s fooling, what she called her fooling or her teasing. ("Train")
• I never would have counted Franklin or any poet as deserving of the sympathy I gave the novelists, I mean for their faded or even vanished condition. I don’t know exactly why. Perhaps I think poetry is more of an end in itself.
• I wanted to run after them, pound them to pieces. I walked up and down as this grievous excitement got more and more of a hold on me.
• Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry? And not too much or not too little, just enough.