“Speaking of the moment when bats ‘fluttered away from the insectivore line and gave rise to ourselves’... ‘What fragment of man, perhaps a useful fragment, departed with them?’”
This passage is driving me nuts. Is it saying that bats came about from insects? Then saying that humans came about from bats? “-ivore,” I guess, implies that they fluttered away from eating insects, but I don’t see how that leads to “giving rise to ourselves.” Ultimately, it seems to be saying that bats ate insects then began to feed on us before fluttering away from us. I get that. I’m just uncertain on how the sentences go about communicating that.
As a side note, I believe I’ve asked this at another time in another post in a different manner, but how do you handle passages/sentences/etc that you don’t understand? Mark it and return, brute-force it, or maybe even ignore it?
I think that for me, there’s a certain level of anxiety with not getting something, particularly literary texts. It really drives me nuts. I enjoy and love chewing on a text, whether it be the slow-burn of reading a big book or chewing on the micro, sentence-by-sentence basis. But the fear of not being smart enough or, rather, being too dumb for XYZ is stressful at times. Maybe it boils down to a lack of patience or maturity, as not understanding something can put me in a small frenzy while simultaneously getting me “stuck” on the passage. It’s hard to progress in a book when I’m obsessing over a sentence I don’t fully understand.
Take the opening sentence of The Recognitions. It’s amazing (you can preview the book and the sentence on Amazon if you don’t have it handy; use desktop mode if you’re on mobile). Chewing on that sentence was absolutely a blast. It took me a while to understand what it meant, and I still haven’t gotten around to articulating how the sentence works or what it’s actually saying.