"That it is," I said. "You have a choice up on this mountain: either you can lose contact with history, as I sometimes choose to, or mentally you can do what you're doing - by the light of the moon, for hours on end, work to regain possession of it."
-I Married A Communist-
 
isn't that perfectly lovely? when i grow up i want a holiday home on the slope of a mountain, looking over a lake where the moon will rise, every 15 days, in a perfect round circle of complacence.
 
"To me it seems likely that more acts of personal betrayal were tellingly perpetrated in America in the decade after the war - say between '46 and '56 - than in any other period in our history...when had betrayal ever been so destigmatized and rewarded in this country? It was everywhere during those years, the accessible transgression, the permissible transgression that any American could commit. Not only does the pleasure of betrayal replace the prohibition, but you transgress without giving up your moral authority. You retain your purity at the same time as you are patriotically betraying - at the same time as you are realizing a satisfaction that verges on the sexual with its ambiguous components of pleasure and weakness, of aggression and shame: the satisfaction of undermining. Undermining sweethearts. Undermining rivals. Undermining friends. Betrayal in this same zone of perverse and illicit and fragmented pleasure. An interesting, manipulative, underground type of pleasure in which there is much that a human being finds appealing."
-I Married A Communist-
 
this is for the historians of 13a. so much more interesting than kwok's notes dont you think? betraying friends who were communists, was that right or wrong? where does your ideology penetrate your human relations and interactions with others, if it is ever supposed to in the first place? and does a different way of thinking equate them to being your enemies, does it mean that you need to "reform" them to come around to your way? or could it just be possible to coexist differently. i don't know. and it's not just ideology, in terms of morals, beliefs, values. if someone holds a different set of values from you, is it alright to lose respect for them, or should you still respect them, for it is only a different way of thinking.
 
see, this is exactly why my friend did not take lit. there's too much confusion. still, it's nice to be thinking again, after mindlessly doing bio for so long =P