#RachelCuskTogether Day 76 "And in fact I could hear the noise of the city in the background, but my initial impression - which was that Lawrence was in that moment alone and surrounded by infinite empty distances which he gazed down on in terror and awe - remained."

#RachelCuskTogether Day 76 "My whole life has been a fake, he said I said there was no reason to believe that that perception wasn't fake too." (silly 😂)

#RachelCuskTogether Day 75 "The concept of justice he had evolved as a result of these experiences was not retributive but the reverse. He had tried to develop his own capacity for forgiveness in order to be free."

#TwoGents_2025 Julia! No! Silvia: For whose dear sake thou didst then rend thy faith Into a thousand oaths; and all those oaths Descended into perjury, to love me. Thou hast no faith left now, unless thou'dst two; And that's far worse than none; (V.4.47-52)

#NYRBWomen25 The Sun King - Chapter 6: Poison "The King said the trials could go on so long as all evidence relative to Mme de Montespan was suppressed. But as the dossiers were full of such evidence, that would be a travesty of justice." ... "...He burnt all the papers relevant to the affair."

#RachelCuskTogether Day 74 "I had been thinking lately about evil, I went on, and was beginning to realize that it was not a product of will but of its opposite, of surrender. It represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire."

#NYRBWomen25 The Sun King - Chapter 5 Now he threw caution to the winds and had a series of violent, unexpected and costly love affairs in the full light of day: a pretty face seemed able to do anything with him. ... The King seemed well on the way to becoming a dirty old man.

#TwoGents_2025 Julia: But love will not be spurr'd to what it loathes. (V.2.7-8)

#NYRBWomen25 The Sun King - Chapter 4 "The Queen, who loved gambling and was as stupid at cards as she was at everything else, invariably lost."

#TwoGents_2025 Julia: Alas, poor Proteus! Thou hast entertain'd A fox to be the shepherd of thy lambs. (IV.4.96-97) I accidentally read/watched the whole scene yesterday. I was so caught up in it.

#TwoGents_2025 Launce: How many masters would do this for his servant? Nay, I'll be sworn, I have sat in the stocks for puddings he hath stolen, otherwise he had been executed; I have stood on the pillory for geese he hath killed, otherwise he had suffered for't. (IV.4.29-33)

#RachelCuskTogether Day 70 "The problem was, the more complex he allowed his vision of life to become, the further he removed himself from his own capacity to act." (That me)

#RachelCuskTogether Day 69 "Amanda had a youthful appearance on which the patina of age was clumsily applied, as if, rather than growing older, she had merely been carelessly handled, like a crumbled photograph of a child."

#TwoGents_2025 Silvia: But think upon my grief, a lady's grief, And on the justice of my flying hence, To keep me from a most unholy match, Which heaven and fortune still rewards with plagues. (IV.3.20-23)

#RachelCuskTogether Day 67 "I imagined her in the dusk of a Paris garden, untouched in her white dress, an object thirsting if not for interpretation then for the fulfilment at least of an admiring human gaze, like a painting hanging on a wall, waiting." Lyrical precision and unsettling undertone.

#TwoGents_2025 Duke: Ay, and perversely she persevers so. (III.2.29)

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.

#NYRBWomen25 The Sun King "He (Louis XIV) offered Le Nôtre (principal gardener of Versailles) a coat of arms but the idea was treated with derision: ‘I’ve got one already, three slugs crowned with cabbage leaves’."

#NYRBWomen25 The Sun King "Colbert thought that too many galley slaves died - the Intendant of the Galleys swore they were well fed but said they died of grief and boredom. We can imagine these two rich, comfortable coutiers conversing together on the subject in some golden drawing-room."

#RachelCuskTogether Day 66 "It was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist's vision, I said. Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again." Losing the autonomy of perception?

#TwoGents_2025 Launce: She hath more qualities than a water-spaniel; which is much in a bare Christian. (III.1.275-276)

#NYRBWomen25 The Sun King - Chapter 1, The House "Modest Louise, who blushed to be a mistress...a simple country girl, an excellent rider, puzzled and perplexed in the Byzantine atmosphere of the Court, though by no means averse from the financial benefits to be picked up there."

#RachelCuskTogether Day 65 "Other kids had fish fingers and choc ices in their freezers: Jane had half-decomposed vermin."

#TwoGents_2025 Valentine: My ears are stopt and cannot hear good news, So much of bad already hath possess'd them. (III.1.209-210)

#RachelCuskTogether #MarsdenHartley Lobster on a Black Background and Painting #48 by American modernist painter Marsden Hartley.

#RachelCuskTogether Day 63 "I hadn't expected to like Julian, I added, any more than he had expected to like me. 'Julian,' the Chair said, 'or his book?' As far as I was concerned, I said, they were the same thing." ... "'That's a strange thing for a writer to say,' he said."

#TwoGents_2025 Duke: Pray thee, let me feel thy cloak upon me. (III.1.139) This line is working on multiple levels.

#RachelCuskTogether "His thirst for love, he went on, was such that he became convinced his parents had never really loved him at all."

#TwoGents_2025 Proteus: Unheedful vows may heedfully be broken, And he wants wit that wants resolved will To learn his wit to exchange the bad for better. (II.6.11-13) The art of rationalizing being terrible.

#RachelCuskTogether Day 61 "He supposed, he said, that the time would come when the book people were now reading would seem no more personal to him than the skin a snake has discarded and left lying there."

#RachelCuskTogether Day 57 "Coming to himself was like opening a Christmas present and finding that what was inside was already broken."

#TwoGents_2025 Proteus: Is it mine, or Valentine's praise, Her true perfection, or my false transgression, That makes me reasonless to reason thus? (II.4.204-206) Uh-oh! Troubles brewing. I'm enjoying this much more than I anticipated.

#TwoGents_2025 Valentine: Sir Turio borrows his wit from your ladyship's looks, and spends what he borrows kindly in your company. Turio: Sir, if you spend word-for-word with me, I shall make your wit bankrupt. (II.4.35-39)

#TwoGents_2025 Speed: ...but you are so without these follies, that these follies are within you and shine through you like the water in an urinal, that not an eye that sees you but is a physician to comment on your malady. (II.1.36-40)

Sonnet 137 Thou blind fool, Love, what doest thou to mine eyes, William Shakespeare

#RachelCuskTogether "...he was literally plagued by this sense of them as children in adults' bodies." I often get the feeling that serious people are "playing" at the things they're doing, rather than earnestly doing them...lawyers, parents, chefs, gang members (don't ask).

#RachelCuskTogether Day 55 "'But you can't stop people coming in,' he said, 'and you can't ask what's in it for you when they do.'"

#TwoGents_2025 #2Gents_2025 Speed: Ay sir: I, a lost mutton, gave your letter to her, a laced mutton*, and she, a laced mutton, gave me, a lost mutton, nothing for my labour. (I.1.97-99) Arden 3rd * mutton - a promiscuous woman; a prostitute.

#RachelCuskTogether Day 54 "'Well, it's true, isn't it,' he said, somewhat petulantly." This line seems emblematic of many (if not all) of the characters Faye interacts with. They assert, then sulk.

#TwoGents_2025 "...was the play being performed in the opening scenes of the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1998, Shakespeare in Love, in which the ‘Henslowe’ character says, ‘Love and a bit with a dog, that’s what they like’. Shakespeare’s original audience no doubt agreed.." Intro in Arden 3rd

#TwoGents_2025 "...I have to conclude that Shakespeare cheerfully and knowingly travesties love and friendship alike, thus clearing the ground for the greatness of his high romantic comedies, from Love's Labour's Lost through Twelfth Night." Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

#RachelCuskTogether Day 52 "...a curious feature was moulded into the white plaster, a human face. All the houses had them: each face was different, some female and some male; their eyes looked down slightly, as though interrogating the person standing on the threshold."

#RachelCuskTogether Day 50 "Her large, slack body had an unmistakable core of violence..." "His skin had the blue-grey colour of breathlessness..." "The house on either side stood as though in feigned ignorance of the squalor in their midst..."

New-to-me book treat today. #SundaySarton

#RachelCuskTogether Day 48 "In the distance the faint drone of the city could be heard, so that the nearby silence seemed somehow man-made. This feeling, I said to Gerard, of the very air being constructed, was to me the essence of civilisation."

#KingLear_2025 Kent: He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer. (V.3.385-387) Thank you, Christina, and everybody, for another rewarding read.

#RachelCuskTogether Day 47 "...the once-sordid building (pub) now a refurbished allusion to its own non-existent history." Spaces and buildings in Transt are a kind of shorthand for people’s inner lives — not exactly personified, but compressed metaphors.

#KingLear_2025 Regan: Jesters do oft prove prophets. (V.3.85)

#RachelCuskTogether Day 45 "...a city was a decipherable interface, a sort of lexicon of human behaviour that did half the work of decoding the mystery of self, so that you could effectively communicate through a kind of shorthand."

#KingLear_2025 Gloucester: A man may rot even here. (V.2.9)