The 3rd house in astrology is associated with writing, conversation, personal thoughts, day-to-day things, siblings and neighbors.
Sunday, May 30, 2004Reading: Middlesex
Passages of delightful writing in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex bring a smile to my face every time I pick it up. I’m not quite halfway through. Here’s a bit I just read… In the midst of telling the story of his birth – after the epic story of his ancestry – the narrator (a hermaphrodite) pauses to reflect:
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever…
– from Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction
