Posted by:
Human
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Date: March 29, 2024 04:11PM
I’ve read a lot of literature, roughly sixty volumes a year every year since I was eighteen. Yet there are still many great things left unattempted. And some, like Scott, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Malamud, purposely saved for “old age”. At 55 I’m still waiting for old age.
Some books are for our mature years, that are wasted on youth. It’s said that Flaubert’s *A Sentimental Education* shouldn’t be read by anyone under fifty. Of course when I read that bit of advice at twenty-five I immediately read the book and found the advice pure poppycock. Then I reread *A Sentimental Education* at fifty and yup, you guessed it…
This Good Friday finds me about to finish a novel for adults, for grown-up people. I hate finishing things; it always pains me somehow, whether it’s a novel or the last pass along the driveway with a snow shovel (which I just came in from doing). Rather than immediately finishing James Salter’s *Light Years*, allow me to share a few things.
First, this is a superb novel about marriage. I’ll spare you the list of superlatives and simply say they all apply.
Eff it: I’ll leave a few links and quotes, make myself a toddy, then finish the novel up. I feel myself bursting.
On James Salter and his “last book”:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/the-last-bookJhumpa Lahiri on reading the novel when young and when not so young:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/26/spellbound-2/A few quotes:
“The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?”
“But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.”
“The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life—it was not worth much—not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one—we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.”
“There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams…”
The book:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/160042/light-years-by-james-salter/Human