Audio

Book listening possibilities opened up wide for me this Christmas. My dad and my brother & sister-in-law got me an iPod Nano, the first mp3 player I've owned, with an adapter for playing through the tape deck in my truck. Not only can I now draw on the CD collections at the libraries along with the tapes, I can also stick the Nano in my back pocket and listen while I work sometimes. And there's all sorts of downloadable stuff out there to be taken advantage of, of course, besides what the libraries offer. Among download sources, Librivox is something pointed out to me last year by Fisher, and now I've had a chance to give it something of a closer look. Listened to their recording of More's Utopia earlier this month, for example, and have started getting a little poetry into the mix. Very grateful to be suddenly so enriched.

I understand that people put music on their mp3 players, too, but so far I haven't tried this.

In the truck, it happens, I'm staying old school for the moment, still working on (not being on the road to the usual extent in past couple of weeks) a tape set of Madame Bovary — something I should have bothered getting to a long time ago. Here, one of the striking passages from Bovary:

When Emma burst into tears he tried to comfort her, protesting his love and saying things to make her smile.
    "It's because I love you," she would interrupt. "I love you so much that I can't do without you — you know that, don't you? Sometimes I want so much to see you that it tears me to pieces. 'Where is he?' I wonder. 'Maybe he's with other women. They're smiling at him, he's going up close to them....' Tell me it isn't true! Tell me you don't like any of them! Some of them are prettier than I am, but none of them can love you the way I do. I'm your slave and your concubine! You're my king, my idol! You're good! You're beautiful! You're wise! You're strong!"
    He had had many such things said to him so many times that none of them had any freshness for him. Emma was like all his other mistresses; and as the charm of novelty gradually slipped from her like a piece of her clothing, he saw revealed in all its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and always speaks the same language. He had no perception — this man of such vast experience — of the dissimilarity of feeling that might underlie similarities of expression. Since he had heard those same words uttered by loose women or prostitutes, he had little belief in their sincerity when he heard them now: the more flowery a person's speech, he thought, the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed. Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.