Hahaha good point!

Most tempting day-end stopping point yet … I admit I continued on a sentence or two to unlock the mystery!

Personification of buildings …

Me too

Boy, that sure is rectilinear!

Great find!! This reinforces the sense that Cusk uses structure as metaphor. Her living space, she describes here, as “…a record of your mistakes and your successes; it’s almost unbearably real in that way.”

Also, I love that she’s created “a room of her own.”

“His first act…after I left [was to] knock down all the…walls…to create one enormous space. For weeks [it] was a chaos of rubble…a steel beam had to be transported…to support the roof...[He was frenzied]...to stand at the windows at one end...and see all the way thru the windows at the other.”

Quote by Karen Shepard: “..all of my fiction is centrally concerned (obsessed?) with the way my characters swing between protecting themselves and taking responsibility for themselves. I’m interested in the sources and consequences of those behaviors, and” [how empathy enables taking responsibility]

P.1 “a major transit was due to occur shortly in my sky.” Astronomical transit is when a celestial object passes visually in front of another; w/ planets & sun, it’s rare. Astrological transit interprets mvmt of planets from where they were at person’s birth to predict future.[cue portentous music]

“Excruciatingly banal” is my new favorite phrase!

This is the cover for my edition … Hollow? Reflecting/echoing external sounds? Poised precariously on shifting sand? And yet, still so beautiful?

Reminiscent of another existentialist work, Nausea by Sartre.

“She would feel the word [meaninglessness] start to rise, and she would try to hold it down but it kept coming, rising and rising until it had popped into her head.”

Complete existential angst as her life, environment, mind splinters.

The scimitar image stopped me in my tracks … what a threatening herald for a new day. Maybe because I just re-read Kafka’s Metamorphosis … it is looking and feeling to me so grim, disconnected, and dystopian.

This reminds me of a remarkable collaboration that emerged out of the pandemic called The Birdsong Project. 172 songs and 73 poems, plus essays, artwork and more contributed by hundreds of artists and performers. All inspired by birdsong. www.thebirdsongproject.com/for-the-birds

This is really cool. I can detect it best with the wood thrush and the oriole, but the spectrograms visually suggest noticeable parallels.

It is so powerful to think of him sitting in prison and hearing these birds.

Thank you so much for posting. It is so mournful. It doesn’t sound like birds to me … as some other classical pieces sometimes do … more like wind moaning through empty caverns. But, either way, wind or birds, they still move freely and sing.

This narrative thread has been giving me the creeps since the first boat ride out to the secluded cove.

I started to say I hadn’t read either, and then realized they are movies … grabbing the popcorn soon!