Book Notes, Fiction # Tar Baby By Toni Morrison (1981) ★★★★☆ First read in April 2022 --- It's an excellent book, very intellectual. It was difficult to read now, especially immediately after having read [[Purple Hibiscus]], but that may be because of constant interruptions and my own general exhaustion these days, not because of the book itself.  One thing though that I disliked was the use of proper nouns (capitalised nouns, names of places and things) without making it crystal clear what they were. Is it a shop, a boat, an intersection, a monument, a village? She uses a lot of those. I dislike proper nouns in novels, especially when the author is being “clever” or “poetic” with them and because they are so goddamn local, in both space and time.  ## Quotes I liked "At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.  No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens - that letting go- you let go because you can. The world will always be there - while you sleep it will be there - when you wake it will be there as well.  Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossoms or fruit are not defective; they are that.” ### Other notes & quotes - Related to my growing suspicion that we don’t change. That as old people, we are mostly the same, just in old bodies. I’m starting to realise how terrifying and strange that must be. ==“The problem with growing old is not that you change, but that the world around you does.”== - Related to my increasing realisation that the world belongs to the worst of us - the violent, the deceitful, the cruel. On America - =="Its pavements slick with the blood of all the best people. As soon as a man or woman did something generous or said something bold, pictures of their funeral lines appeared in the foreign press.”== - Related to my ongoing struggle with learning things about the world, to then having to carry on living with that knowledge forever. (Things like this: a child is abused or severely neglected every 47 seconds in the United States.) Talking about a character’s ‘innocence’, about them not knowing their son was being abused when he was a baby - =="An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore unworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind.”== - On "the great underclass of undocumented men". ==“What distinguished them from other men was their refusal to equate work with life and an inability to stay anywhere long.”== =="You think you're above money, the rat race and all that. But you're not above it, you're just without it. It's a prison, poverty."== --- `Just carbon and water. Just atoms and the void.` ---