The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

...and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality.

The goldfinch gets free from its chains and has robbed my notes, so this is my short review and quotes:

Everyone would like a friend as Hobie…

Quotes:

What was the line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall apart and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when - what was the point? All this useless sorrow? Considers the lilies of the field. Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren’t we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?

Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, put something all his own from it into the world. Because - the line of beauty is the line of beauty.

...a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular.

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throw a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

The true is that I’ve lost my notes from my tablet (blessed times when books were just on paper).

But one man loved
The pilgrim soul in you
And loved the sorrows
Of you changing face
(W.B. Yeats)


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