## Metadata - Author: [[James Wood]] - Full Title: The Nearest Thing to Life - Category: #books ## Highlights - The laugh of fictional life lasts longer than the bloody cough of death. ([Location 306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=306)) - Stories produce offspring, genetic splinters of themselves, hapless embodiments of their original inability to tell the whole tale. ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=360)) - But if the life of a story is in its excess, in its surplus, in the riot of things beyond order and form, then it can also be said that the life-surplus of a story lies in its details. For details represent those moments in a story where form is outlived, canceled, evaded. ([Location 375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=375)) - Like Ryabovich and Edith, we are the sum of our details. (Or rather, we exceed the sum of our details; we fail to compute.) ([Location 411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=411)) - Often, in conversation in the States, I’m about to start a story about some aspect of my childhood, some memory, and I stop, aware that I can’t quite heave into narrative the incommunicable mass of obscure and distant detail. ([Location 417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=417)) - Of course, I don’t want my children to have exactly the same childhood as I did: that would almost be a definition of conservatism. ([Location 457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=457)) - (I’m also aware that worrying about lack of pungency is a peculiarly middle-class, Western affliction; much of the world is full of people suffering from a surfeit of bloody pungency.) ([Location 459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=459)) - the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us—the memories of our childhood, the almost-forgotten pungency of flavors, smells, textures: the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention. ([Location 573](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=573)) - Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary—the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”)—is steadily retreating; in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back to the most ordinary things—to soccer boots and grass, to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Old Spice and Ajax. ([Location 577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=577)) - Literature, like art, pushes against time’s fancy—makes us insomniacs in the halls of habit, offers to rescue the life of things from the dead. ([Location 587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=587)) - To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction. . . . But the real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper’s rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself. The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. ([Location 603](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=603)) - what Walter Benjamin once called “the natural prayer of the soul: attentiveness.” ([Location 634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=634)) - I have never forgotten the following information, from the same chapter, about Émile Zola’s work habits: “He claimed that at times the effort of struggling with a rebellious passage actually caused him to have an erection.” ([Location 666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=666)) - Often, simplicity is the only possible way of saying of a novel or a poem, “this moved me,” “this was beautiful,” “this silences me.” This confounds me. Simplicity is the climate of the preliminary, the wide realm in which we utter our first affective responses. ([Location 803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=803)) - For two hours they had been looking at pictures. But they had seen one of which the lecturer himself was unconscious—the outline of the man against the screen, an ascetic figure in evening dress who paused and pondered, and then raised his stick and pointed. That was a picture that would remain in memory together with the rest, a rough sketch that would serve many of the audience in years to come as the portrait of a great critic, a man of profound sensibility but of exacting honesty, who, when reason could penetrate no further, broke off; but was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there. ([Location 875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=875)) - there is a lovely subspecies called the English cadence, used often by composers like Tallis and Byrd, in which, just before the expected resolution, a dissonance sharpens its blade and seems about to wreck things—and is then persuaded home, as it should be. ([Location 908](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=908)) - Simenon, who was asked why he didn’t change his nationality, “the way successful francophone Belgians often did.” Simenon replied: “There was no reason for me to be born Belgian, so there’s no reason for me to stop being Belgian.” ([Location 974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=974)) - Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality. ([Location 985](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00UM5ZUNK&location=985))