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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 20h

Yes! And whatever happened to marriage shoved her from the "being in the moment" to the "observing the moments" way of living.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 1d

There's a thought. Could be.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 1d

People living in the moment know that is the most real. Only the people who live outside the moment, analyzing and assessing, wonder... and maybe they only wonder which is more real because they are judged by those who don't wonder but know.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 1d

"Those people were living in their moment, and though I could set it I could no more return to that moment than I would walk across the water that separated us. And those two ways of living--living in the moment and living outside of it--which was the more real?" p75
+1
#rachelcusktogether

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 3d

Yes! Exactly.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 4d

Same, dude. Same.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 4d

Only if that is what YOU want to do. You are doing all the work. I'm just along for the ride. 😊

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 4d

Oh, I thought we talked about Lost Illusions and Lost Souls. Perhaps I am misremembering.

But I do love a long read.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 4d

Since you are driving the bus, you get to choose. But Balzac is staring at me from across the room....

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 5d

A shift from people to place... with the same attention to detail. Still, she was looking for the person in the place and seemed to find nothing more than that first impression.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 6d

So true!

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 6d

I agree.... I don't trust him either. He's too comfortable with shaping the world to fit his own agenda.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 6d

to a total stranger (like people are want to do) while on a plane (or whatever) and then finding your story in someone's book.
Would there be horror? Would there be pleasure?
Perhaps there would be enough difference (truth is often sacrificed for the sake of a story) to deny the whole of it.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 6d

The voice is hypnotizing. The detailed description is entrancing.And the precise word choice is stellar.
Yet I cannot help but think about the people she's captured and drawn on these pages. The book is described as both fiction and nonfiction.
So imagine telling intimate secrets #rachelcusktogether

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 7d

I think this true each time you write something--except perhaps when in the midst of a piece. Most of those in that fever pitch of writing who go to bed in a fog of their characters' lives, who dream of their characters' next steps, and who wake to write more know this relearning process is coming.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 9d

#AnthonyPowellTogether
Oooh! A Widmerpool reference.

JacquiWine @jacquiwine.bsky.social · 9d

#RIP Jilly Cooper.

Here she is on Barbara Pym, from the introduction to the current Virago edition of JANE AND PRUDENCE. #BookSky #JillyCooper 💙📚

Another of the reasons I loved Barbara Pym's books when I was single was because she seemed to understand the utter desolation of losing a man, or not having one to love. Barbara had, in fact, bitter experience herself and was so heartbroken by one love affaire in 1943 that she burnt all the diaries covering it. The bleakness of its aftermath, described in her autobiography A Very Private Eye, makes unbearable reading. But from the ashes, nine years later in Jane and Prudence, rose Fabian Driver, who was based on the ex-lover and who in self-obsession and vanity, (Ego and Narcissus), ranks alongside Mr Collins, Kenneth Widmerpool and Malvolio as one of literature's great comic creations.

Virago edition of Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence, showing a colourful illustration of two women possibly sharing a secret.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 12d

Her powers of observation are second only to her ability to describe what she observes.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 12d

I keep thinking about the flight attendant with her props: "we listened or half-listened, thinking about other things, as though some special hardness had been bestowed on us by this coupling of formality with doom."
"Special hardness" absolutely encapsulates that feeling.
#RachelCuskTogether

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 12d

Oh, I am in a blue state. But maybe my silver hair and demeanor are too forbidding. You have a good tactic, though.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 13d

It's nice to know it still happens somewhere!

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 13d

People don't talk to each other at all--in the line at supermarkets, waiting for coffee orders, etc. And those who do speak? They are to be avoided.
Pretty strange behavior for social animals.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 13d

Thanks so much!

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 13d

So... these are the Grene and Lattimore translations? The cover info is unclear.

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 14d

Oh yes! that is exactly what I was talking about.
Thank you!

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rpmoon.bsky.social @rpmoon.bsky.social · 14d

#rachelcusktogether
I have opened the first volume--publisher Picador--and what is this font?!
Books used to say which font was used, some even had the history of the font in a little blurb on the back page.
Sigh.

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