책 읽는 즐거움 1: Darryl Pincney, David Reich, Samantha Power, ....

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요새는 Darryl Pinckney의 Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manharran (2022), David Reich의 Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (2018), 그리고 Samantha Power의 The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (2019)를 읽고 있다. 다 특유의 재미를 준다. Power는 집에서 읽기로 했지만, 도서관 라운지나 요새 주로 이용하는 커피집 'Devil's Food'에서는 들고 간 다른 두 책 중에 어떤 책부터 펼쳐야 할지 늘 조금 망서리게 된다. 다 맛있는 복숭아와 자두, 어느 것부터 먹지.

 

Come Back in September 에서:

 

Elizabeth read the citation for [Susan] Sontag's prize that she'd written. She took out her glasses, said, -- Umph, which made everyone laugh, and then began:

   -- In reading On Photography today we are also reading a classic of the future.

   [....]

   Susan was so pleased it made her bashful. (p. 111)

 

   Elizabeth [Hardwick] was working, telling me[Darryl Pinckney] again that writing turns into a matter of plodding along.

   -- My first drafts always read as if they had been written by a chicken.

   I remember her talking about the joy of revision, but she also said that anyone who can't bring himself to the pain of revision can't be a real writer. She said nights of restless envy were a part of it and showed me what she thought was a brilliant essay in the Review on the kabbalah by a classmate whom I didn't much care for.

   It was a relief not to be teaching, she noted. And to write about Olga Ivinskaya's memoir of having been Pasternak's mistress clearly gave Elizabrth a way to address the experience of survival and the unreality of literary legacies that had been on her mind since [Robert] Lowell's death, emotions that she found herself either living out or trying to avoid. (p. 112)

 

 

 

Who We Are and How We Got Here 에서:

 

So how much Neanderthal ancestry do people outside of Africa carry today? We found that non-African genomes today are around 1.5 to 2.1 percent Neanderthal in origin [in a 2023 Nature paper], with the higher numbers in East Aasians and the lower numbers in Europeans, despite the fact that Europe was the homeland of the Neanderthals. We now know that at least part of explanation is dilution. Ancient DNA from Europeans who lived before nine thousand years ago shows that pre-Europeans has just as much Neanderthal ancestry as East Asians do today. (p. 40)

 

   Another example is the Japanese. For many tens of thousands of years, the Japanese archpelago was dominated by hunter-gatherers, but around twenty-three hundred years ago, mainland-derived agriculture began to be practiced and was associated with an archaeological culture with clear similarities to contemporary cultures on the Korean peninsula. The genetic data confirm that the spread of farming to the islands was mediated by migration. Modeling present-day Japanese as a mixture of two anciently divergent populations of entirely East Asian origin -- one related to present-day Koreans and one related to the Ainu who today are restricted to the nothernmost Japanese island and whose DNA is similar  to that of pre-farming hunter-gatherers -- Naruya Saitou and colleagues estimated that present-day Japanese have about 80 percent farmer and 20 percent hunter-gatherer ancestry. Relying on the sizes of segments of farmer-related ancestry in Present-day Japanese, we and Saitou estimated the average date of mixture to be around sixteen hundred years ago [in a 2013 Genetics paper]. (p.198)

 

 

 

The Education of an Idealist 에서:

 

   On August 20th, 2011, Libyans in Tripoli rose up against Qaddafi, breaking a month-long military stalemate and marking the overthrow of the repressive government. I was at home with Declan, who was nearly two and a half years old. "Qaddafi is gone!" I told him, somewhat amazed.

   My young son began marching around our apartment, shouting, "No more coffee! Coffee is gone!" (p. 309)

 

   Incited by extremist Buddist monks and backed by government security forces, local Burmese vigilantes had recently killed hundreds of Rohingya and burned many villages to the ground, displacing more than 100,000 people. Hatred toward this minority group was so widespread that I had even heard Burmese human rights lawyers speak about the Rohingya with contempt.

   When I brought up how state forces had pushed Rohingya families out of their homes and violently attacked them, Aung San Kyi had a ready answer. "Do not forget that there is violence on both sides," she said, repeating a false claim made by Buddist radicals to justify the attacks. (p. 315)

 

 

 

 

이 책들을 읽으면서도, 뉴욕 타임즈 (목요일) By the Book 칼럼 덕분에, 작가의 걸작 소설 두 편(A Severed Head 와 The Sea, The Sea)을 묶은 Iris Murdoch 과 Jhumpa Lahiri가 편집한 The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories (2019) 두 권을 도서관에서 빌려 A Severed Head 와 이태리 단편 두 편을 읽었다. 

 

Kirkus Reviews: A Severed Head

 

A Severed Head 는 이렇게 맺는다:

 

   I ... stood near to her. I worshipped her closeness. I said, 'Well, we must hold hands tightly and hope that we can keep hold of each other through the dream and out into the waking world.'

   As she still would not speak I said, 'Could we be happy?'

   She said, 'This has nothing to do with happiness, nothing whatever.'

   That was true. I took in the promise of her words. I said, 'I wonder if I shall survive it.'

   She said, smiling splendidly, 'You must take your chance!'

   I gave her back the bright light of the smile, now softening at last out of irony. 'So must you, My dear!'

 

Sarah Churchwell, Iris Murdoch의 Introduction에서:

 

In her essay The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited, Murdoch wrote that the most important thing for a novel to reveal, 'not necessarily the only thing, but incomparably the most important thing, is that other people exist.' It ws a point she made repeatedly outside her fiction: 'In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego,' as she wrote in On God and Greed.

 

 

 

 

Italo-Svevo, Generous Wine (Translated by John Penuel)에서:

 

   My daughter Emma thought her mother needed her help. With a tone that struck me as excessively imploring, she said:

   'Papa, stop drinking,'

   And it was on that innocent creature that I poured my wrath. I said to her a harsh and threatening word dictated by an old man's and a father'sresentment. Her eyes immediately filled with tears, and her mother stopped concerning herself with me to concentrate entirely on comforting her.

 

 

Italo Calvino, Dialogue with a Tortoise (Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Sara Teardo)에서:

 

When leaving or returning home, Mr Palomar often bumps into a tortoise. At the sight of this tortoise crossing the lawn, Mr Paloma, always keen to entertain any possible objection to his line of reasoning, momentarily halts his stream of thoughts, correcting or clarifying certain points, or in any case calling them into question and assessing their validity.

 

[....]

 

   Mr Palomar: 'I would be quite proud of this. But I'll go even further. Why stop at the animal kingdom? Why not annex the plant kingdom in to the I? Would Man be expected to think and speak for the sequoias, the thousand-year-old cryptomeria, the lichens, the fungi, the heather bush into which you, hounded by my arguments, now rush to hide?'

   'Not only do I not object, I'll go a step further. Beyond the Man-funa-fora continuum, any discourse presumed to be universal must include metals, salts, rocks, beryl, feldspar, sulphur, rare gases and all the non-living matter that constitutes the near-totality of the univers.'

   'That's just where I wanted to take you, Tortoise! Watching your little snout poke in and out of all that shell, I've always thought you were unable to determine where your subjectivity ends and where the outside world begins: if you have an I that lives inside the shell, or if that shell is the I, an I that contains the outside world within it, then the innert matter becomes part of you. Now that I am thinking your thoughts, I realize we don't have a problem: for you there's no difference between the I and the shell, that is to say, between the I and the world.'

   'The same applies to you, Man. Goodbye.'

 

 

 

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Joys of the Italian Short Story