The unbearable lightness of being (Kundera, 1984/2004)

Kundera

Atonement, unabridged audio (MacEwan, 2007)

The year of magical thinking, the play (Didion, 2007)

The year of magical thinking (Didion, 2005)

In retrospect : The tragedy and lessons of Vietnam, abridged audio (Vandemark & McNamara, 1995)

Guns, germs, & steel: The fates of human societies, abridged audio (Diamond, 1997/2001)

The shadow of Sirius (Merwin, 2008)

Readings in Progress:
The mismeasure of men (Gould, 1999)

Didion

Empire and communications (Innis, 1950/2007)

On the origin of stories : Evolution, cognition, and fiction (Boyd, 2009)

The nature of fiction (Currie, 1990)

Philosophy in the flesh : The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999)

The question concerning technology, and other essays (Heidegger, 1977)

Animal signals (Maynard Smith, 2003)

Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language (Dunbar, 1996)

The book tells the story of how a young upper middle class English girl goes about realizing her first love & overcoming social/self deception; a delighful, short read with settings in Florence, Italy. I read a red hardcover copy from the Penn State University Library, probably the Abinger Edition re-printed in 1977. The following are some striking quotes from the book noticed in my first reading of this Victorian-era fiction (emphases are mine):

- pg.58: “It was Phaethon who drove them to Fiesole that memorable day, a youth all irresponsibility and fire…”

- pg.73: “The luxury of self-exposure kept her almost happy through the long evening.”

- p.75: “She could not modulate out of the key of self-abasement in which she had started.”

- p.87: “They wished that they also knew Italian, for our phrases of approval & of amazement are so connected with little occasions that we fear to use them on great ones.”

- p.94: “Youth seldom criticizes the accomplished fact.”

- p.94: “An engagement is so potent a thing that sooner or later it reduces all who speak of it to this state of cheerful awe… It has a strange power, for it compels not only the lips, but the very heart.”

- p.108: “Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of refined nature.”

- p.120: “Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion; we cannot tell whether our secret is important or not.”

- p.126: “How d’ye do? Come and have a bathe.”

- p.143: “He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.”

- p.158: “[My father]… says that there is only one perfect view – the view of the sky straight over our heads.”

- p.161: “The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness & hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.”

- p.171: “He looked at her, instead of through her, for the first time since they were engaged. From a Leonardo she had become a living woman, with mysteries and forces of her own, with qualities that even eluded art.”

- p.202: “It isn’t possible to love & to part.”