notes
- I initially thought this was a ghost story
- In a way, the girl resembles a ghost, only wanting to move on after fulfilling her final wish, telling her brother what happened
- Almost a frame narrative but not really
- “Later…” building suspense from the first chapter
- Revealing information bit by bit
- Numbness and acceptance, sometimes lucid, sometimes gone
- Inferiority complex causes anger with no object
- Who has power here? The man can’t get rid of the girl, but the girl gets beat by him
- Not reacting to violence makes one still as a lake with no ripples
- Mirror reflecting the perpetrator
- Misery
- Mirror reflecting the perpetrator
- Violence as a distraction from hatred or inferiority
- Wanting to project strong negative affect onto one single thing
- Not reacting to violence makes one still as a lake with no ripples
- Black curtain
- Constructed by her own psyche to protect herself from the trauma of the past
- Three perspectives: man, girl, brother’s classmates
- Fragmented mind state
- Why does she become more coherent after being assaulted?
- Insanity, her parts can be hard to follow
- Fear of darkness
- Bluebird, birds
- Barn imagery
- Fluidity of memory in There a Petal Silently Falls
- Insanity as a space: depths of a dark cavity, dungeon-like, netherworld, separated by a black curtain
- The characters remain unnamed — this could be anyone’s story
lecture 2025-04-29
- We, students → collective memory, searching for truth
highlights
— Page: 2, added on Sun Apr 27 15:54:16 2025
Don’t he too quick to sympathize with this wasted girl who longs to escape the shadows for the sunlight, and if she retreats from your indifference or from a smile or gesture you may have let slip, don’t spit on her footprints as if she were bad luck—-even if she blocks your path for a moment, even if you feel a blind urge to escape your predicament by assaulting her, knocking her clown, stomping on her, strangling her, disposing of her with out a trace. Because even if you do all this, many other girls will notice a young man like you. Traumatized and deranged, they will follow you, crying “Brother!”
— Page: 3, added on Sun Apr 27 16:00:37 2025
It was an act of escape and confirmation.
— Page: 3, added on Sun Apr 27 15:59:06 2025
Later the man would say that unlike on other days, he hesitated at those woods, But he had nothing specific in mind before he entered them; it was just that something about them seemed odd that day, so odd he forgot for an instant the girl who meekly followed him like an animal would its trainer.
— Page: 3, added on Sun Apr 27 15:58:53 2025
The noise from the traffic on the pavement above pounded in his temples, provoking him, translating his discomfort into visceral fear.
— Page: 3, added on Sun Apr 27 15:59:49 2025
In one violent spasm of motion, as if trying to escape from a trap, he fell upon the girl from behind,
— Page: 4, added on Sun Apr 27 16:03:11 2025
He felt intensely, soaringly violent whenever he saw her, and ultimately he lacked the superhuman effort necessary to control these impulses.
— Page: 4, added on Sun Apr 27 16:01:20 2025
Her existence triggered in him a feeling of powerlessness without cause, anger without object.
— Page: 4, added on Sun Apr 27 16:03:33 2025
She was dirty, frightening, awful.
— Page: 6, added on Sun Apr 27 16:10:46 2025
Where did that stink come from? It’s in me now, it’s in my blood, and they’re not going to leave me alone. Maybe they’ll all go crazy because of me.
— Page: 7, added on Sun Apr 27 16:13:12 2025
In the emptiness of my mind there’s only a cold wind.
— Page: 10, added on Sun Apr 27 16:28:52 2025
Perhaps her memories of that riot of faces had dissolved in her blood, becoming a burdensome, enforced presence that wore her down.
— Page: 13, added on Sun Apr 27 16:35:31 2025
Among them were a few stars, twinkling painfully, spots of pus from a sore, bringing goose humps to the back of my neck.
— Page: 13, added on Sun Apr 27 16:36:01 2025
Except for earth worms, grasshoppers, things like that… or maybe poisonous snakes, boa constrictors.
— Page: 16, added on Sun Apr 27 16:41:54 2025
Thousands of those birds could attack me, hut I’ll never cry omit, I’ll never get down on my knees, I’ll never ask for mercy.
— Page: 17, added on Sun Apr 27 16:54:54 2025
No longer did the man force alcohol down the girl; no longer did his blind, incomprehensible rage provoke assaults on her.
— Page: 19, added on Sun Apr 27 16:58:12 2025
He could no longer tell how long it had been since he had become incapable of forcing alcohol down her, abusing her, invading her body. Instead a different series of questions rose before him: Does she even recognize me? Can she tell me apart from others? Is it me she’s smiling at? Or is it a face that’s stuck in her messed-up mind? Did she think I was someone else when she started following me at the riverside a couple of months ago?
— Page: 19, added on Sun Apr 27 16:58:15 2025
Her response to each of these items was a laugh that he could only characterize as the color red, a laugh that sent a lingering chill down his spine.
— Page: 19, added on Sun Apr 27 16:57:39 2025
Not that he had grown indifferent; rather, he was compelled to concentrate on fathoming the reasons this girl had been driven to the brink of insanity.
— Page: 20, added on Sun Apr 27 17:02:33 2025
The sheets of rain fell evenly over the innocent landscape, lashing tile ground painlessly, a tender tattoo that left no deep scars.
— Page: 21, added on Sun Apr 27 17:04:08 2025
This lack of patience is the critical weakness of youth. We were all iii the habit of hoping for the quickest, most f — vorable outcome, and though we realized that this inclination led to more mistakes on our part, we were fir from cOflViflced of’ the wisdom of indirection or mere waiting.
— Page: 21, added on Sun Apr 27 17:05:51 2025
At that instant, f’or the first time in his life, he felt shame and fiar at the sight of’ another human being.
— Page: 23, added on Sun Apr 27 17:11:11 2025
Even if the girl’s consciousness plunged now and then into a dungeon-like oblivion of chaos and derangement, her body accomplished its most basic functions. Instinctively it fol owed the sun; her feet automatically avoided pitfalls, moving with certainty toward that which would satisfy her hunger. Somewhere inside of her was inscribed the record of what had happened to her, and even when she mistook utter strangers for her kin, even when she confused past with present, her senses led her on a course more certain than rationality.
— Page: 24, added on Sun Apr 27 17:11:58 2025
Stop up the shameful breath ofmy lfe; split open my innards, swarming with maggots; fry my blood vessels, crooked as the veins in a dried-up branch; incinerate my groaning bones, enduring like shameful memories; burn my leathery skin. Let me disintegrate. Let me he dust.
— Page: 24, added on Sun Apr 27 17:13:05 2025
It was the face of some mad bitch, a woman who’d slept too long, who’d kept her mouth shut too long. Her dirty face stuck to the glass like an insect that wouldn’t go away.
— Page: 25, added on Sun Apr 27 17:14:50 2025
My nose filled with the awful stink from that gaping mouth. I was afraid spiders and little stringy snakes would crawl out of it and bite my feet. I couldn’t stand there any longer.
— Page: 27, added on Sun Apr 27 17:18:33 2025
Rumors began to swirl and surge in the cities, coursing swiftly from one lone mouth to the next like a tah )O, rumors of a massacre in a city to the south, the details too horrible to be believed,
— Page: 27, added on Sun Apr 27 17:16:37 2025
That black curtain? It never existed. But for a long time I thought it did, l)ecause I wanted that en rtain badly, wanted it to cover up everything. The memories of that day, clearer than water or glass, I painted over in white. Just like the hor rible faces of those (lead people were paiute(l over. If I was going to he invisible, if I was going to (lie once and for all, white was the only color I could paint myselE
— Page: 27, added on Sun Apr 27 17:18:16 2025
The man had begun to feel as if one by one those hurts were penetrating his own body. Every instant he spent with the girl was painful, but he couldn’t identify the source of that pain. His brutal, untamed heart throbbed and smoldered; he felt as if his skin were on fire.
— Page: 28, added on Sun Apr 27 17:20:56 2025
The man’s heart dropped. Perhaps in his inarticulate way he feared that the girl would end up just like those coins, slipping through his fingers, trampled by count less feet, covered with earth, and forgotten for all time.
— Page: 30, added on Sun Apr 27 17:25:54 2025
For in following the girl he had finally come face to face with the world she inhabited—the netherworld occupied by the insane. The man felt himself slipping slowly into that sub terranean place. To him it was a world of white, the white ash of cremated corpses. A place where suffering was consumed like flesh.
— Page: 31, added on Sun Apr 27 17:27:00 2025
And I told myself “Girl, don’t you ever think back.” Because if I (lid, then the fabric of that curtain would wear. And when the curtain finally wore through, the events of that (lay would come hack to life as if a search light had hit them.
— Page: 32, added on Sun Apr 27 17:29:52 2025
Just make sure you don’t put your hands over your ears while I’m talking. If you do, I’ll turn to dust.
— Page: 36, added on Sun Apr 27 17:36:50 2025
And now I have nowhere to go. Nowhere except Brother’s grave. I have to tell him, even if it kills him again. Then I can turn into dust and disappear into the ground.
— Page: 36, added on Sun Apr 27 17:36:02 2025
The slipperiness of Mama’s arm beneath your foot, the warmth of her hand in yours—you shook your head over and over to get rid of the image of your mother flickering Sc) clearly before your eyes.
— Page: 36, added on Sun Apr 27 17:36:11 2025
I can never return to that day. To the place where I committed that terrible crime. Where I stamped on Mama’s hand, her arm, her empty gaze, so that I alone could live.
— Page: 36, added on Sun Apr 27 17:36:30 2025
Mother had a dream, and I, her daughter, had crushed it.
— Page: 37, added on Sun Apr 27 17:38:20 2025
We had found to our surprise that in this region there were several people just like the girl who, if not necessarily for the same reason, were wan dering around in the grip of some compulsion.
— Page: 37, added on Sun Apr 27 17:38:45 2025
To the dead, death is not an event. It happens, harsh and vivid, only to the living. For death has no answers; it leaves incomplete that which should be completed.
— Page: 38, added on Sun Apr 27 17:41:01 2025
That smile seemed to he mocking the haste with which we, her brother’s class mates, had set out in search of her, and now that we were wide awake we spent the hours remaining till dawn wonder ing exactly why we had launched this search. To comfort our lost friend with the knowledge that we had found her To pacify the soul of their departed mother? To fulfill our of obligation to do something after what had happened that day in that city to the south? Or because we couldn’t live with ourselves if we did nothing? Did we want a quick cure for the suffering that we in our immaturity felt? Were we motivated by a masochistic desire to find in that girl a corporeal vestige of that horrible day? In wanting to protect a girl who was al ready wasted psychologically, were we merely indulging in a cheap excuse for humanitarianism? Did we, like that wan dering girl, wish to keep awake for fear of sleep? Or were we trying simply to live on in spite of the cancerous nightmares we carried inside us?