Wat een werkelijk fantastisch boek!! Het gaf me een warm gevoel, ondanks het voor mij al heel snel duidelijke gebruik (misbruik?) van de student door de Germaniste, want Duncker schrijft al op p. 19: 'She was never affectionate. She never used any terms of endearment, never told me that she loved me, and never held my hand. When she took me to bed she kissed me as if there was some distance to be covered and she was intent on getting there without interference.'
Ik beperk mij nu verder tot het kort overtypen van mijn mooiste fragmenten, voor mijn eigen plezier en hopelijk ook dat van jullie :-).
'Writing a thesis is a lonely obsessive activity. You live inside your head, nowhere else.'
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'It was the end of May, exam time for the undergraduates. We were all infected with exam paralysis as well as thesis paranoia.'
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'As I stood before the largest of the triangles the shape began to make sense, hardened into the form of my promise to her. I was facing a prism that remained masked and simply reflected rather than refracted the light. I found myself at the base point of two interlocking triangles. It was then that I had the peculiar sensation that something was being shown to me, explained, but that I had as yet no way of breaking into the code, no means of understanding the blank, flat surfaces.'
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'Hospitals are strange intermediary zones where sickness and health become ambiguous, relative states.'
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'There are two kinds of loneliness, aren't there? There's the loneliness of absolute solitude - the physical fact of living alone, working alone, as I have always done. This need not be painful. (...) But there is another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure. (...) And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass. They reassure themselves with conformity, with carefully constructed resemblances. You are masked, aware of your absolute difference.'
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'Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradion. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. (...) Maybe madness is the excess of possibility, petit. And writing is about reducing possibility to one idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity.'
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