Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene: Day 11
Part I, Chapter X, Parts 2-3 (p. 118-128)
“Those Guardia were Guardia, not windmills. I am Father Quixote, and not Don Quixote. I tell you, I exist. My adventures are my own adventures, not his. I go my way—–my way—not his. I have free will.”
Very fortissimo: Give Father Quixote more wine. Many characters can talk these lines, but it seems to me only Father Quixote, like his predecessor, can reach for some truth, even by cliches.
“I know that Marx and Lenin existed. You only believe.”
Oh Sancho! This reminds me of one of my favorite exchanges between my husband and two evangelists at our door. After a long, one-way conversation from the visitors, my husband said reasonably, “We’re trained as scientists so we can never say, we know the truth.” To which the evangelists replied reasonably: “Precisely, sir. That’s the difference between you and us. You can’t say you know the truth, but we know the truth.”
“There is always a fallacy to be found in a logical argument.”
“Logical thought does often lead to absurd situations.”
Some of the best absurdities come from logic—it seems so to me, at least. This is why I don’t feel convinced by the effects of absurdities in fiction unless there is logic to be discerned in the first place. (I’m looking at some of the new novels I read this year for the Booker Prize judging. Pray, I want to say to them, where is your logic?)
Join us on December 3 for a virtual discussion of Monsignor Quixote with Yiyun Li.
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I love - may I call them this - “mini-craft lessons”- Yiyun gives us while commenting on this book. Yes we can suspend our beliefs in reading a book, but there must be logic we can follow
p112: "In any case he had no wish to be an instrument of human justice."
I've often had this very desire, and I suspect, many of us are the same. And yet, I have such a strong need to see justice carried out. Sigh.
pp.119: "'I prefer the silence of peace to the silence which comes after success—that silence is like the permanent silence of death. And not a good death either.'"
Yes! This! I fully understand this. The disappointed of having achieved what (you thought) you wanted.