reading on Mansoor

Online news in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Arthur C. Clarke’s description of online news, written in 1967, is detailed and prescient.

There was plenty to occupy his time, even if he did nothing but sit and read. When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his fools-cap-sized Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.

2001: A Space Odyssey - Author's Foreword

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Arthur C. Clarke:

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.

Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.

The missing self in Beloved

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

The story describes horrific physical punishments endured by enslaved people, but I’m also haunted by the missing sense of self among the characters. Morrison captures with unsparing empathy what these people lost in their enslavement.

Baby Suggs:

Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.

Beloved - Sethe

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

It always amazes me when a writer covers a lot of ground in short form. This early passage in Belvoved not only defines the character of Sethe, it establishes the evil side of the ghost inhabiting their house, and describes the terror of living with it.

Looking, in fact acting, like a girl instead of the quiet, queenly woman Denver had known all her life. The one who never looked away, who when a man got stomped to death by a mare right in front of Sawyer’s restaurant did not look away; and when a sow began eating her own litter did not look away then either. And when the baby’s spirit picked up Here Boy and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break two of his legs and dislocate his eye, so hard he went into convulsions and chewed up his tongue, still her mother had not looked away. She had taken a hammer, knocked the dog unconscious, wiped away the blood and saliva, pushed his eye back in his head and set his leg bones. He recovered, mute and off-balance, more because of his untrustworthy eye than his bent legs, and winter, summer, drizzle or dry, nothing could persuade him to enter the house again.

Nature is safety in Beloved

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

The Forest Clearing by Ivan Shiskin, 1896

Early in the story, we read about Denver’s ring of boxwood bushes, which help her feel safe. Later, we learn that Baby Suggs’s “unchurched sermons” also took place in a similar hollowed-out part of nature, a clearing in the forest.

Back beyond 124 was a narrow field that stopped itself at a wood. On the yonder side of these woods, a stream. In these woods, between the field and the stream, hidden by post oaks, five boxwood bushes, planted in a ring, had started stretching toward each other four feet off the ground to form a round, empty room seven feet high, its walls fifty inches of murmuring leaves. Bent low, Denver could crawl into this room, and once there she could stand all the way up in emerald light. . . .Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as easy as a wish. (Act I, p34)

Beloved - A look of snow

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Question:
What does the phrase “shot a look of snow” mean? “Over Denver’s shoulder Sethe shot Paul D a look of snow.”

Claude:
It’s a poetic or literary expression describing a glance that is cold, icy, or emotionally frigid — the kind of look that conveys contempt, disdain, or chilling disapproval.

The word “snow” carries connotations of coldness, whiteness (suggesting blankness or severity), and harshness. So to “shoot a look of snow” at someone is to give them a withering, freezing stare — one that makes the recipient feel shut out or frozen in place.

The romance of Beloved

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Morrison describes a range of human experiences in Beloved: cooking, parenting, looking for work, working, education, and household repairs. She structures each one with the knowledge, actions, and feelings that might be appropriate to a formerly enslaved person. Here she does it with the romance between Sethe and Paul D.

She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pitched ceiling and not the walls. There were two rooms and she took him into one of them, hoping he wouldn’t mind the fact that she was not prepared; that though she could remember desire, she had forgotten how it worked; the clutch and helplessness that resided in the hands; how blindness was altered so that what leapt to the eye were places to lie down, and all else—doorknobs, straps, hooks, the sadness that crouched in corners, and the passing of time—was interference.

The magical realism of Beloved

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

The use of it in Beloved is great because it’s never arbitrary, it’s in the service of the story. Here, it foreshadows the arrival of Beloved and the relationship Beloved will have with Sethe.

When Denver looked in, she saw her mother on her knees in prayer, which was not unusual. What was unusual (even for a girl who had lived all her life in a house peopled by the living activity of the dead) was that a white dress knelt down next to her mother and had its sleeve around her mother’s waist. And it was the tender embrace of the dress sleeve that made Denver remember the details of her birth—that and the thin, whipping snow she was standing in, like the fruit of common flowers.

Beloved - Author's Foreword

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Excerpt from Toni Morrison’s foreword:

I think now it was the shock of liberation that drew my thoughts to what “free” could possibly mean to women. In the eighties, the debate was still roiling: equal pay, equal treatment, access to professions, schools and choice without stigma. To marry or not. To have children or not. Inevitably these thoughts led me to the different history of black women in this country a history in which marriage was discouraged, impossible, or illegal; in which birthing children was required, but “having” them, being responsible for them—being, in other words, their parent—was as out of the question as freedom. Assertions of parenthood under conditions peculiar to the logic of institutional enslavement were criminal.

Isolation is crushing in Of Mice and Men

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Under Sunny Skies by Karen Winters, karenwinters.com

Yes, mice and men oft have schemes that go awry, but Of Mice and Men makes the case that they’re also both social creatures in need of companionship and reassurance. Maybe not coincidentally, the narrator of Robert Burns’s poem is a man connecting with a mouse, empathizing with the destruction of his home, and reassuring the mouse that he means it no harm.

Wide Sargasso Sea - Turned her face to the wall

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Question:
In the book Wide Sargasso Sea, one character is described as “Your aunty old woman now, she turn her face to the wall.” What does that mean?

Claude:
This line refers to Aunt Cora, and “turned her face to the wall” is an old idiom meaning someone has given up on life — withdrawn from the world, lost the will to live, or is quietly waiting for death.

It comes from a biblical image (2 Kings 20:2, where Hezekiah turns his face to the wall to pray before death) and became a common expression in English for someone who has emotionally or spiritually surrendered. It doesn’t necessarily mean the person is literally dying at that moment, but that they’ve become passive, despairing, and disconnected from the living world around them.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0400

La mer des Sargasses dans l'Atlantique nord, Cartographiée d'après Otto Krümmel 1854-1912

Edgwidge Danticat, in her introduction, clarifies that Wide Sargasso Sea is based on Jane Eyre, but that it is not mere fan fiction. There are many reasons: Jean Rhys brings us to a different time and place (post-emancipation Jamaica and Dominica), gives depth to the character of Bertha, describes the initiating reason for and the dyfunction of Rochester and Bertha’s relationship, and introduces a set of characters that define the setting and influence Bertha and Rochester’s relationship.

Influences and references in Jane Eyre

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

“You were a reader before you were a writer.” J.D. Salinger

The events of Charlotte Bronte’s own life provided material for Jane Eyre, but the novel is also full of references and allusions to literature. Thanks to the limit on copyright, most can be read online for free:

The Bible
Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights)
Sacred Songs and Lalla Rookh, “Paradise and the Peri” by Thomas Moore
The Sublime and the Beautiful by Edmund Burke
The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
“Marmion” by Sir Walter Scott
“Die Braut von Korinth (The Bride of Corinth)” by Goethe
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Paradise Lost by Milton
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
Shakespeare: Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra
“The Bonnie Wee Thing” by Robert Burns
Greek Mythology
Blackwood’s Magazine: “The Demoniac”, “The Burning of Indian Widows”, and “The Spectral Dog — An Illusion”
Bluebeard, the pirate folk tale
The League of the Rats by Jean de la Fontaine
The Bride of Abydos by George Gordon Byron
The Iron Shroud by William Mudford
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“To a Skylark” by By Percy Bysshe Shelley

The introspection of Jane Eyre

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

There’s a self-awareness to Jane as a narrator that’s both very specific and beautifully worded:

I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other; and as neither present circumstances warranted, nor my present mood inclined me to mutiny, I observed careful obedience to St John’s directions; (ch xxxiv)

Two powerful quotes from Jane Eyre

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Both of these made me stop reading and just think. The footnotes pointed out the structure of the first: four statements in passive voice that emphasize the active voice of the fifth. The second one takes the reader by surprise and is just…beautiful.

The burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured; the responsibility fulfilled. I set out. (ch xxviii)

‘And I shall see it again,’ he said aloud, ‘in dreams, when I sleep by the Ganges; and again, in a more remote hour - when another slumber overcomes me, on the shore of a darker stream!’ (ch xxxiv)

Jane Eyre learned Urdu

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

From the novel:

‘Jane, what are you doing?’

‘Learning German.’

‘I want you to give up German and learn Hindostanee.’

‘You are not in earnest?"

‘In such earnest that I must have it so: and I will tell you why.’

He then went on to explain that Hindostanee was the language he was himself at present studying; that, as he advanced, he was apt to forget the commencement; that it would assist him greatly to have a pupil with whom he might again and again go over the elements, and so fix them thoroughly in his mind; that his choice had hovered for some time between me and his sisters; but that he had fixed on me because he saw I could sit at a task the longest of the three. Would I do him this favour? I should not, perhaps, have to make the sacrifice long, as it wanted now barely three months to his departure.

Jane Eyre was written by a woman

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Charlotte Bronte first released Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell to give the impression the novel had been written by a man. This footnote is a funny (and sobering) explanation of why.

From the novel:

From school duties she was exonerated: Mrs Fairfax had pressed me into her service, and I was all day in the storeroom, helping (or hindering) her and the cook; learning to make custards and cheese-cakes and French pastry, to truss game and garnish dessert-dishes.

Jane Eyre: Words and phrases

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

There are many more, of course, but these are a few that I jotted down:

agate - on hand
Bethesda - a pool of sacred healing in Jerusalem
bombazeen - twilled, heavy cloth, generally black, a sign of mourning
cachination - immoderate laughter
cui bono - For whose good
Deo volante - God Willing
hebdomadal - every seven days
Juggernaut - Jaganath (Krishna)
noan faâl - by no means ugly
par parenthese - by the way
parterre - ornamental flower border
prenomens - forename
stark - dead
syncope - failure of the heart, resulting in a swoon
tant pis - too bad

The Eve of Waterloo

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0400

There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium’s Capital had gathered then
Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;

A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell;
But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

Brave New World: Unless we decentralize

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

From the Author’s Foreword to the 1946 edition:

All things considered, it looks as though Utopia were far closer to us than anyone, only fifteen years ago, could have imagined. Then, I projected it six hundred years into the future. Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century. That is, if we refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens in the interval. Indeed, unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supranational totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atom revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Brave New World: An efficient totalitarian state

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

From the Author’s Foreword to the 1946 edition:

There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient - and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

Brave New World: Author's Foreword to the 1946 Edition

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Aldous Huxley explains why he didn’t change the “considerable” defects of Brave New World in the new edition.

CHRONIC REMORSE, AS all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Success

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 12:00:00 -0400

To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of the intelligent people
and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty;
to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better
whether by a healthy child, a garden patch,
or a redeemed social condition;
to know that one life has breathed easier
because you lived here.
This is to have succeeded.