If the above-quoted passages haven't made it clear, reading The Making of Americans is kind of like mental vacuuming: you keep going over the same thoughts and phrases, sometimes taking it in more of them and sometimes less, every once in a while coming across a new scrap of verbal debris which is immediately sucked up by a powerful nozzle and occasionally spit back in fragments. It's also best done while doing something else: listening to music, waiting for water to boil, even watching TV. The whole thing takes a fairly long time but is oddly calming, and at the end you feel a vague sense of accomplishment out of all proportion to the actual difference between where you started and where you've ended up.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
How's my analogizing?
If the above-quoted passages haven't made it clear, reading The Making of Americans is kind of like mental vacuuming: you keep going over the same thoughts and phrases, sometimes taking it in more of them and sometimes less, every once in a while coming across a new scrap of verbal debris which is immediately sucked up by a powerful nozzle and occasionally spit back in fragments. It's also best done while doing something else: listening to music, waiting for water to boil, even watching TV. The whole thing takes a fairly long time but is oddly calming, and at the end you feel a vague sense of accomplishment out of all proportion to the actual difference between where you started and where you've ended up.
