“Goodnight And Great Love To You. We See The Same Stars.”

i have returned to the emptiness which inevitably follows reading a very very good book and having nothing to read afterwards because i can't think of anything that would be as good...(this is my not so subtle way of asking if anyone knows books similar to the charioteer and can recommend them 😭)

I would like an Alastair/Jem friendship 😤😤

“Give me to be beautiful within,” Socrates had prayed, “and for me let outward and inward things be reconciled together.” (99)

A little tribute piece to what is probably, definitely my favorite comfort novel, The Charioteer by Mary Renault.

i'm dying to know what Cordelia asked Alastair - - did she tell him about the paladin situation? did she really give him Cortana? If she did, what was his reaction? How did she get through it? Did he comfort her? Did they plan to find a way out of the whole thing?

There's also something grand about Alastair as a child, demanding the blade be his, to Alastair now as an adult refusing to wield the sword at all. He doesn't just love Cordelia, he respects her as a Shadowhunter and fighter and will not take her weapon for himself 😭 I really doubt, even if she gave it to him, that he would use it.

I completely forgot the line you mentioned about Andrew’s mind being where it should have been, but your comments about it are spot on! Andrew is too saddened by Laurie leaving, and then too distracted by refusing his demands, that he cannot think enough to come up with a way to comfort Charlot, his actual charge. It really makes the whole thing 10x sadder. I'm definitely gonna have to go back and reread that scene now, just to get a clearer sense of it all!

Re: 'the loss of that relationship feels real to me' I think is because it is a real loss. Laurie loved Andrew, and always felt their relationship to be real even when Ralph didn't, but by the end he can never see him again. It's heartbreaking.

Actually, both times I read the book, I came away happy for Laurie but also very sad and I think his relationship with Andrew (and Andrew's whole storyline) is the reason why. If you think about it, at the end of the book, Laurie is put in the exact same position Ralph was all those years ago at school: here is someone who adores him, and who refuses to believe that he's done what he's been accused of simply because he cannot fathom that he'd do it. And what does Laurie do? Exactly what Ralph did: he tells the truth, gives Andrew the Phaedrus and goes away. But what will happen to Andrew after this? We don't know and neither does Laurie. He may die in the next 5 years, but even if he doesn't, it seems hopelessly optimistic to envision a similar happy ending to Laurie's for him.

Propaganda for Andrew's moral code....

Time for a bit of Andrew love I think.

@telltaleangelina I loved your post about Ralph/Laurie’s philosophy of life compared with Andrew’s, which so resonated with me - they have a kind of heroic idealism which is very attractive, and apart from anything else it supplies most of the drama and action of the book!

But it also made me want to think more about Andrew and his motivations. So, inspired by the 'Hot Austen men' polls, here is some propaganda for Andrew. At fifteen he had to decide whether to throw in his lot with the military side of his family or the pacifist one, and it is made clear he took this decision seriously:

“I thought all around it. I thought there might conceivably even be some circumstances when I felt it was right to kill. If I knew whom I was killing and the circumstance and the nature of the responsibility. What I finally stuck at was surrendering my moral choice to men I'd never met, about whose moral standards I knew nothing whatever."

He becomes a CO not to abrogate moral responsibility but so that he can take responsibility for his actions.  Later he and Laurie have this exchange:

“One has to draw the line where one sees it oneself."

"Is that what you call the inner light?"

"If you like, yes."

So the thing that strikes me about the Charlot incident is that his principled stance is not blind faith or rigidity of thought. His main regret is that fighting with Laurie prevented him finding a solution to the problem.  He says:

“If I ... if my mind had been where it should have been, I'd have known what ought to be done, something would have come to me."

Laurie says:

"I do this kind of thing. I get steamed up about things that happen to people till I've got to do something or burst, and if it turns out to do more harm than good, hell, what's the odds, it did good to me. At school for instance. A man -- one of the boys I mean, was going to be sacked, and because I liked him I took for granted he couldn't have done it, and I was all set to have raised hell and involved a lot of other people. And all the time he'd done it after all."

Laurie admits that actually it feels good to ‘do’ something, even if the other person doesn't want it. It is easy to see that both of them have a valid point when it comes to the practicalities.  But for me, the point is that as long as they are trying to impose their will on each other, and operating from a place of ego, there is no possibility of finding another solution.  There are a hundred things they could have done to ease Charlot’s last moments if they had stopped thinking about themselves for one moment.  I think it's interesting for example that Laurie is the only person Charlot still recognises but he wants to 'outsource' comfort to someone else.

And then I realised that when Laurie is referring back to his 16 year old self getting 'steamed up' it is Ralph who points out to him that however much he might ‘want’ to ‘do’ something, it will be hurting other innocent people such as his own family (and very likely including Ralph himself).

Often, Laurie is annoyed at Ralph's inability to stand by.  The bit on the stairs at the party, for instance, and the bit where he tells Ralph "You can't eat and breathe for me, or live for me. No one can."  Pretty strong stuff to say to the man you just made passionate love to a moment ago! And let's not forget the comment about the drunk trying to mend the watch.

Sometimes I think the really sad thing is that Laurie is locked in to a different system of morality (The Phaedrus), one which means he is Andrew’s mentor and protector and Andrew is the innocent and therefore had no real moral agency. I'm not sure that means he could have or should have been with Andrew as a romantic partner, but the loss of that relationship feels real to me.

And finally....I think you have made me understand something that has always puzzled/amused me a little bit about the arguments that Laurie/Ralph have. He uses all those military analogies that seem to suggest that even while he sees that Ralph is trying to dominate him and battles with it, he is also, kind of, comfortable with it. And maybe it is that he sees himself in Ralph, he completely understands why Ralph is behaving the way he does. I always find that so touching (a little bit funny too, especially the captain shouting 'fire'!)

have you ever thought about how any normal person being introduced to the shadow world would probably rather be a vampire or werewolf than a shadowhunter? it's a little funny considering they all think they're better than downworlders but "I'll be young and beautiful forever without hunting things that'll kill me" is just objectively a better job description lol

There's absolutely no way James will die, simply because of the fact that Jace has the same birthmark that stretches back to Will. The only option that could allow for James to die and also for the birthmark to reach Jace would be if Tessa and Will had a third son, which is impossible to insert into the story at this point because we have seen Tessa in the modern day and heard many references to her and Will's children - - they only had two, never was another one mentioned. It also can't happen that James dies and then another child is adopted into the family and takes the Herondale name because that would logically mean that this adopted child did not inherit the birthmark and therefore neither did any of his descendants, including Jace. This would be a plot hole, considering that it's known for a fact that Jace has this birthmark and it was this birthmark that saved Jace's life and allowed Imogen Herondale to realize he was her grandson.

Came across a mention of this short story by Mary Renault in her biography and found it in the Internet Archive. It’s kind of christmassy, I guess 🎄

“According to Celsus” by Mary Renault

How is 'The Last of the Wine' going?

It's really good so far but for some reason it's taking me forever to get through, I don't know why! There are a lot of things I love about it: I love Alexias, I love the story of how he was named and of his uncle, I love how Socrates was introduced, I love Lysis, I love the introduction of Phaedo (even though that whole portion made me cry)...the whole thing really picked up after Alexias' father finally went off to war but I'm still way behind in the book given the amount of time I've had to get through it. Did you have a similar problem or is it just me?

did it hurt? when you forget your headphones and couldn’t romanticise your walk home?