I'm about halfway through and am utterly in love. Preliminary stuff I liked:
"I switch off the light and leave the bathroom. A heavy, damp stillness lies over the house. The whispers of people who don't exist, the breath of the dead. I look around, standing stock-still, and take a deep breath. The clock shows three p.m., the two hands cold and distant. They're pretending to be noncommittal, but I know they're not on my side. It's nearly time for me to say good-bye. I pick up my backpack and slip it over my shoulders. I've carried it any number of times, but now it feels so much heavier." (11)
"I'm free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can't really understand what it means. All I know is I'm totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who's lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don't know, and I give up thinking about it." (44)
"But I'm scared, and my teeth won't stop chattering. Try as I might I can't get them to stop. I stretch out my hands and look at them. Both are shaking a bit. They look like somebody else's hands, not my own. Like a pair of little animals with a life all their own. My palms sting, like I grabbed onto a hot metal bar." (71)
"Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through, is now like something from the distant past. We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology...But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone." (98) <--This is something I'd really like to pursue...but not memories on an individual level, but rather on a human level...what things get "stuck" in the consciousness of all human existence, even when no individual consciousnesses are alive to remember them?
Hope you all are enjoying your breaks!
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On that last quotation, I think there could be something really important in there that could help us politicize the piece, if only for a moment. By this I do not mean project an image of Bush in Iraq when it says "no one remembers the war," but rather as Annie said, exploring why we remember certain things as a society without anyone to explicitly tell us to remember them.
I also think this could provide a really good juxtaposition to the other side of this piece, which is "who will remember ME?" A lot of the characters in these works seek peace, seek harmony, seek being creators, seek making a mark, seek permanence, which of course is impossible. Or is it? Right so there we have something great to explore: fighting over someone's memory, fighting over humanity's memory, juxtaposed with those who are going about their daily lives consuming/discarding/ absorbing certain consciousnesses/memories. I like slashies.
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