a. natasha joukovsky
extracts blog
After Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, where he tracks allusions to whales and cetology, I keep a running list of references to recursion, innovation, mythology, and glamour.
Young the Giant | MIRROR MASTER
“Look in the mirror
Familiar figure
Staring right back at me…”
THE PRINCESS BRIDE
MAN IN BLACK: All right: where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead.
Henry James | THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
"Keen as her interest in the rugged relics of the Roman past that lay scattered about her and in which the corrosion of centuries had still left so much of individual life, her thoughts, after resting a while on these things, had wandered..."
Geoffrey West | SCALE
"Mandelbrot's insights imply that when viewed through a coarse-grained lens of varying resolution, a hidden simplicity and regularity is revealed underlying the extraordinary complexity and diversity in much of the world around us..."
Jonathan Swift | GULLIVER'S TRAVELS
"So, naturalists observe, a flea,
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum."
Virginia Woolf | A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Henry James | THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
'Well, you're not in love with her, I hope.'
'How can that be, when I'm in love with Another?'
'You're in love with yourself, that's the Other!'
George Eliot | MIDDLEMARCH
"Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before,
Repeating things behind."
Arcade Fire | CREATURE COMFORT
"Some boys hate themselves
Spend their lives resenting their fathers
Some girls hate their bodies
Stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback..."
Arcade Fire | REFLEKTOR
"I thought, I found a way to enter
It's just a reflektor (It's just a reflektor)
I thought, I found the connector
It's just a reflektor (It's just a reflektor) Just a reflektor..."
Jonathan Franzen | PURITY
"There's that great passage in Proust where Marcel talks about imagining the face of the girl you've only glimpsed from behind. How beautiful the unseen face always is..."
George Eliot | MIDDLEMARCH
"Art is an old language with a great many artificial affected styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing."
Will Durant | THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
"Human knowledge had become unmanageably vast; every science had begotten a dozen more, each subtler than the rest..."
Yuval Noah Harari | SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND
"We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles--but nobody knows where we're going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power..."
Yuval Noah Harari | SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND
"...in order to establish such complex organizations, it's necessary to convince many strangers to cooperate with one another. And this will happen only if these strangers believe in some shared myths..."
Herman Melville | MOBY DICK
"And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned..."
The Velvet Underground | I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR
"I'll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don't know
I'll be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that you're home..."
Donna Tartt | THE SECRET HISTORY
"Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside of literature?..."
J. D. Daniels | THE CORRESPONDENCE
"There are visions a man can only tolerate in a mirror. To see them face-to-face turns him to stone."