I've been trying hard (ok, well not hard enough) to finish Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity. It has been neither difficult nor extremely exciting reading. I tend to grab the book just before sleep catches me by my eyelids, finishing only 10 pages or so a night, quite unlike my normal reading tendencies. Finally nearing the last 25 percent of the book and a couple passages have struck hard and true. One a gentle yet firm reminder that sometimes all the pieces of our knowledge don't add up to equal anything understandable. Another, not so pertinent to me personally as of late, but good words that I've been able to pass on to others regarding work frustration, future career paths, perhaps it applies to our own personal growths as well.
"It's a decadent mind , a mind that has known ennui and passed through it to something more dangerous, that wants fictional contraptions over the more difficult - sometimes more obvious and clear, other times utterly incomprehensible - truth of fact. But this is the opinion of a man who knows nothing, and it's the opinion that I throw at you to make you angry. Anyway, I read news and look for and collect facts because so far they they haven't added up to anything. I had pictured, as a younger man, that the things I knew and would know were bricks in something that would, effortlessly, eventually, shape itself into something recognizable, meaningful. A massive and spiritual sort of geometry - a ziggurat, a pyramid. But here I am now, so many years on, and if there is a shape to all this, it hasn't revealed itself. But no, thus far the things I know grow out, not up, and what might connect all these things, connective tissue or synapses, or just some sense of order, doesn't exist, or isn't functioning, and what I knew at twenty-seven can't be found now." (p.276)
"I believe in fact, and I believe in the plain truth told wholly - that the truth be retold can be a net thrown around life at a certain time and place, encompassing all within, and that people can go out there, live as actors, work within their staging ground, do so with a soft heart; I want others to go out in the world with an idea, with intentions and means, and come back with a story about how their actions affected the world and how they themselves were shaped by the results. I have a belief that such endeavors can improve the world, however recklessly, especially when these people go forward and interact, give, solve, change the situations they encounter - and also, even those with no intentions of recording their actions. There's nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn't be reiterated." (p.297)
