I have to admit when I last read Wuthering Heights (at 12) I thought both Cathy and Heathcliffe were nutjobs.

And zombies definitely would definitely have added something.

And a further part of the conversation from which the above quote was taken:

"....my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath -- a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff -- he's always, always in my mind -- not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself -- but as my own being -- so, don't talk of our separation again...."

As an older, wiser Steph than the one who underlined those words, what I think it is, is that it takes romantic love a shade too far. "My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath -- a source of little visible delight, but necessary," is nice, and makes me want that kind of love. But "Nelly, I am Heathcliff," is just too, too obsessive and dysfunctional.

Yeah, I'm with Cathy up until the self-identification part. I can relate to a love the permeates everything, but the rest of it strikes me as the sort of ecstatic thing you run into with religious folk.

Because I've nearly finished a book? Because I like zombies? Because I'm up at the bright and shiny hour of ten in the morning? I don't see where this is coming from, blondie.

Because I see you post in the middle of the night, the day, the morning, you seem to be in the lab all the time, and yet somehow you manage to watch whole seasons of shows (Dead Like Me, ME's etc) AND read.

I rest my case.

t she says, tossing her blonde hair

t /giving you a hard time

t not really here

Isn't there a fucking ghost in this book? There are only forty pages left.

Cathy in the beginning haunts that lame-ass tenant narrator. One of the best (and most disturbing) scenes ever written.

I think why that book is so brilliant is that you can interpret it in a thousand different ways. It's told third-hand by people who really don't get Cathy and Heathcliff at all. (The narrator is the complete opposite of them, he lets all of his relationships end before they begin) Since nobody who's telling the story really gets C or H, on some pages you sympathize with them and on some pages they're just these ultimate bastards.

I see the book as more of a story about people trying break out of confining roles and failing spectacularly. That moment when Cathy's dieing and she says that she feels like some one took her little girl self who was free and wild and transformed her all at once into this "normal" civilized woman--that's the moment when I relate to Cathy. There's a similar one later when Heathcliff describes how the past 20 years of his life he's spent searching for Cathy's spirit. When he's in the house, she's outside. When he's outside, she's inside. It's mostly their own fault, but it is horrible how again and again everyone and everything denies them peace or comfort.

My heights don't particularly wuther. Why is that? I suppose I should be grateful I do not live on a moor in a time before electricity, especially if there were no Secret Garden Dickons around to keep one sane.

For the life of me, I can't remember a single thing about deconstruction that I learned in college, except that it didn't get an "ism" at the end because "it wasn't a philosophy".

Dead puppies aren't much fun.

Cathy in the beginning haunts that lame-ass tenant narrator. One of the best (and most disturbing) scenes ever written.

But then you read the last line: "I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

I.e. "There are no ghosts, reader! Sucker! Ha-ha!"

I like that.

But that's just what the narrator thinks, and he's very fallible. Earlier they say that the shepherds around there see the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff wandering the moors. It's left to the reader to decide.

Cindy --

I have no poly-sci theory under my belt, and I took Philosophy 101 in the Fall of '85 (and mostly paid attention to cute!boy), so most of me is pretty convinced I'm over my head already, Strega.

Oh, gosh, I'm not speaking from any great font of knowledge. Especially about poli-sci. It's entirely possible I'm talking nonsense that sounded convincing to me at 2 AM. Wouldn't be the first time.

Doesn't pluralism presuppose relativism? Also, I am unconvinced that pluralism is the opposite of absolutism.

I think they're on different levels. Pluralism and absolutism are both about how we should receive and evaluate new ideas. Absolutism says that everything should be judged against the One True Idea, and if there's a contradiction, the new idea is heresy. We do still evaluate ideas in a pluralistic society -- new ideas are incorporated into old ones, or thrown out, or the old idea is replaced. Pluralism doesn't mean "all ideas are equally good," it means "all ideas deserve an equal hearing."

Relativism isn't really opposed to either of those things; it's questioning the basis of evaluation, and says that we can't judge because it's all subjective. We're in a pluralistic society where relativism has been a fairly successful idea. And in some academic circles, it has reached authoritarian status -- saying "I think Shakespeare is inherently better than Toni Morrison" can cause a pretty huge backlash.

How would you have categorized those two statements by Solomon? To you, do they seem odd, proposed side by side?

They made sense to me, though I agree he was being a little too pithy to make his point very well. I think the argument was that books are pluralistic; they allow people to share new ideas and points of view very easily. Relativism isn't all bad, but taken to extremes, it demeans any statement about why one thing is better than another. So that has a bad effect on pluralism, if we can't judge ideas (or books) and say some are better than others. And that in turn makes it hard to counter authoritarian arguments; if all points of view are equally valid, who are we to say theirs is wrong?