The Topeka School
Quotes and highlights from The Topeka School by Ben Lerner — 3 passages I marked up while reading (December 2020). Everything below is taken straight from my Kindle, unedited and in the order I read it.
All 3 highlights
How many of his small gestures and postures in the present were embodied echoes of the past, repetitions just beneath the threshold of his consciousness?
Now more recent traces of tobacco, artificial mint. As his father pulled up to the curb, Adam bit down on a phantom pen.
we felt that history was alive.
What I've written around this
Where these ideas turn up in my own work.
Read alongside
Other books on the shelf that cover similar ground.
I write about what I read — medicine, technology, and what holds up across centuries — in Side Effects. The essays live in the archive, and the rest of the shelf is on Book Notes.