Hmm, so this would be a hard one to recommend. It’s longer (500+ pages) and there really isn’t a flow or real “story” to the book. There are a couple decent themes.

Honestly, the only reason I didn’t drop this book was because it was the only one I took with me on a beach vacation and I love reading physical books on the beach and there wasn’t a used bookstore in walking distance.

General Takeaway

This book is one that I probably wouldn’t recommend or even read again. I missed comprehending so much of this book.

I think the main theme of this book is that “love is the journey, not the destination” and that you should do the journey for yourself, no one else. This definitely isn’t clear. I think you read this are constantly like “what does this little story have anything to do with the main point?”.

Notes

  • “Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness.” [p. 14]
  • Love for innanimate objects [p. 23]
    • I think he is drawing parallels between women and innanimate objects.
  • “time and reverse-time, co-existing” [p. 41]
  • “mirror world” [p. 41]
  • “Trafficking in human vanity… propagating the fallacy that beauty is not in the soul, that is can be bought” [p. 42]
  • Men and politics. Women and love. [p. 91]
  • “the world can only be rescued from certain decay through Heroic Love.” [p. 131]
  • Profane is afraid of love. [p. 143]
  • Alligators … like friends … want to be shot [p. 154]
  • Profane needed the alligators. They gave him a job. [p. 155]
  • Alligators [were] only another consumer object [p. 155]
  • “They want only the skin of a place, the explorer wants its heart. It is perhaps a little like being in love.” [p. 219]
  • Roles of religion / stereotype. “Boxes”. Identities. [p. 241]
  • “V. might be no more a she than a sailing vessel or a nation.” [p. 244]
  • “Everyone has an Antarctic.” [p. 261]
  • “Dreams are like a magic cloak” [p. 275]
  • Satisfying “the beast” [p. 292]
    • “he’d had to abandon: the luxury of being able to see them as individuals” [p. 292]
  • Not economic depression; soul-depression [p. 302]
  • Everyone will become an inanimate object [p. 311]
  • The inanimate war [p. 316]
  • “a congruent world which simply doesn’t care” [p. 317]
  • The world “flipped” after the war [p. 320]
  • “Everthing got cool – no love, no hate, no worries, no excitement. Every once in a while, though, somebody flips back. Back to where he can love…” [p. 320]
  • What does it mean to be human? [p. 321]
  • “Dance of Death” [p. 331]
  • “Surely if ware has any nobility it is in the rebuilding not the destruction.” [p. 347]
  • Poetry is for humans [p. 350]
  • “Only a clear movement toward death or, preferably, non-humanity.” [p. 355]
  • “To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.” [p. 356]
  • “alien from himself” [p. 356]
  • “… in dream there are two worlds: the street and under the street. One is the kingdom of death and one is life.” [p. 359]
  • “These children know what was happening: knew that bombs killed. But what’s a human, after all? No different from a church, obelisk, statue. Only one thing matters: it’s the bomb that wins. Their view of death was non-human. One wonders if our grown-up attitudes, hopelessly tangled as they were with love, social forms and metaphysics, worked any better.” [p. 367]
  • “Anybody who continues to live in a subculture so demonstrably sick has no right to call himself well. The only well thing to do is what I am going to do now, namely, jump out of this window.” [p. 400]
  • “Don’t you know life is the most precious possession you have?” [p. 400]
  • “V.” is a robot who is in love. [p. 457]
  • “Love is love.” [p. 458]
  • “God knows how many Stencils have chased V. about the world.” [p. 501]
  • “… some of us do go nowhere and can con ourselves into believing it to be somewhere.” [p. 504]
  • “The experience, the experience.” [p. 506]
  • “… when the habits of the past become too strong.” [p. 510]
  • “I am old, the world is old; but the world changes always; we, only so far.” [p. 510]
  • “The master is gone, the crew is gone, I am here and I am painting the ship.” [p. 511]
  • “Am I only getting old?… Perhaps past the time I can change with the world. The only change is toward death… As a youth I believed in social progress because I saw changes for personal progress of my own. Today, at age sixty, having gone as far as I’m about to go, I see nothing but a dead end for myself, and if you’re right, for my society as well.” [p. 512]
  • “We call it society. A new coat of paint; don’t you see? She can’t change her own color.” [p. 512]
  • You have the power to define the history of the future. [p. 534]
  • “It could only be age’s worst side-effect: nostalgia” [p. 543]
  • “We – my child and I: why should we continue to live? Why should any of us.” [p. 544]