investigative

11 April 2012 @ 05:00 am

In the Woods

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception. The truth is the most desirable woman in the world, and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her. We betray her routinely, spending hours and days stupor-deep in lies, and then turn back to her holding out the lover's ultimate Möbius strip: But I only did it because I love you so much.

- Tana French

Tags: quotes

Leave a comment

23 April 2009 @ 08:35 am

How to Be Idle -- on Private Detectives

No chapter on walking could be complete without a nod to the private detective, who started to appear in the nineteenth century. He is an attractive character precisely because he is essentially an idler, as Walter Benjamin wrote in Arcades:

Performed in the figure of the flâneur is that of the detective. The flâneur required a social legitimation of his habitus. It suited him very well to see the indolence presented as a plausible front, behind which, in reality, hides the riveted attention of an observer who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight.

The truth of Benjamin's observation is embodied in that great literary loafer Sherlock Holmes, who, we conjecture, became a detective because he liked to loaf in his fictional world; to watch, to think, to walk. Like the poet, the detective does his work by walking and by sitting. He is not a victim of society; instead, he watches it, he stands outside it, he enjoys it, he smiles at its foibles.

-- Tom Hodgkinson

Tags: l, quotes, rp

				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31