How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
'I had fallen in love with Julian.' The words are easily written down. But how to describe the thing itself? It is odd that falling in love, though frequently mentioned in literature, is rarely adequately described. It is after all an astounding phenomenon and for most people it is the most astonishing event that ever happens to them: more astonishing, because more counter-natural, than life's horrors. (2.1.2)
According to Bradley Pearson, what are the most astonishing aspects of falling in love? In his view, how do things like sexual attraction and desire compare to other aspects of the "phenomenon," such as emotional longing and spiritual transformation?
Quote #8
The conventional notion of the Christian God pictures Him as having created and being about to judge. A more intimate theology, and one more consonant with the nature of what we know of love, pictures a demonic force engaged in continuous creation and participation. I felt that I was, at every instant, creating Julian and supporting her being with my own. At the same time I saw her too in every way as I had seen her before. I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say that love is blind. (2.1.6)
When Bradley Pearson writes that he felt as though he was "creating" Julian Baffin and "supporting her being with [his] own," what is he saying? To what extent is the Julian Baffin Bradley has fallen in love with the real Julian Baffin, and to what extent is she a product of his own assumptions, desires, and imagination?
Quote #9
Of course since everything was now connected with Julian, my ambitions as a writer were connected with Julian. But they were not cancelled thereby. Rather something more like the opposite seemed to be happening. She had filled me with a previously unimaginable power which I knew that I would and could use in my art. The deep causes of the universe, the stars, the distant galaxies, the ultimate particles of matter, had fashioned these two things, my love and my art, as aspects of what was ultimately one and the same. They were, I knew, from the same source. (2.1.8)
Considering the tone of the novel on the whole, is Bradley Pearson right in claiming that Julian Baffin herself has given him "a previously unimaginable power," or would it be fairer to say that Bradley's own ideas and feelings have done so?