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.
Oscar Wilde | THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
"This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul..."
Magda Szabo | THE DOOR
"We were liars, cheats, she began--none of it was real. The trees had been made to move by a trick, it was only the branches. someone was filming from a helicopter, circling around..."
David Foster Wallace | INFINITE JEST
"...you process toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there's like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall..."
Leo Tolstoy | ANNA KARENINA
"The shame and disgrace of Alexei Alexandrovich and of Seryozha, and my own terrible shame—death will save it all. To die—and he will repent, pity, love, and suffer for me...’"
Joris-Karl Huysmans | À REBOURS
"Formerly, during his Parisian days, his love for artificiality had led him to abandon real flowers and to use in their place replicas faithfully executed by means of the miracles performed with India rubber and wire..."
Michael Corballis | THE RECURSIVE MIND
"Recursion...is the primary characteristic that distinguishes the human mind from that of other animals. It underlies our ability not only to reflect upon our own minds, but also to simulate the minds of others..."
Leo Tolstoy | ANNA KARENINA
"Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was unpleasant for her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She wanted too much to live herself..."
Ian McEwan | ATONEMENT
"She had come to see that, without intending to, [the letter] delivered a significant personal indictment. Might she come between them in some disastrous fashion? Yes, indeed..."
Jack Kerouac | ON THE ROAD
"It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere."
Ovid | METAMORPHOSES
"As he tried
To quench his thirst, inside him, deep within him,
Another thirst was growing, for he saw
An image in the pool, and fell in love..."
Herman Melville | MOBY DICK
"O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind."