🎩The Remains of the Day

It is a novel, so this is my reading and not a thesis. Stevens has built his whole life on an idea of dignity as perfect service and perfect restraint, in the house of a man whose judgement turned out to be badly wrong. Looking back, he finds that never questioning and never asking cost him his own opinions and the one person who might have loved him, and that he gave them up so smoothly he hardly noticed the transaction.

• The only novel of the year, and I am not proud of the number. Started on Sunday 24 August by the river in Ljubljana, finished on Friday the 29th on the jetty at Lake Bohinj with my feet in the water. See ✈️ Slovenia in late August.
• Published in 1989. A butler takes a motoring trip across England in the summer of 1956 and, over six days, very nearly tells himself the truth.
• Nothing happens and I could not put it down. Noor, on the next towel, said that is the entire trick.
• The promotion file was waiting at home, half built, and I did not expect a butler to have anything to say about it. He did. See 🕯️ Stevens and the promotion file.
• Book twelve for 🎯 Finish 16 books and keep notes on the ones that matter. Five stars, and the highest mark I gave anything finished this year after Meadows.
• Read mostly before breakfast, on the wooden jetty at 🏞️ Lake Bohinj.
• No quotations from a novel in copyright. The two old lines I keep with it are 💬 No longer talk at all about, which is 🏛️ Marcus Aurelius telling himself to stop discussing the good man and be one, and 💬 While we are postponing, life speeds. Stevens discusses dignity for most of the book.
• What had kept me from asking has a plainer name, 🧩 Loss aversion: a no felt as if it would cost more than a yes was worth.