Why do you read? To me this sounds like a sort of emptiness in the intention to read, where the only goal is simply to 'consume' or 'achieve' the book, and the only counterbalancing force is ecstasy or enjoyment. This reduces reading to a mere task and you attend to it like other tasks- always looking beyond it as a burden to release.

I really enjoyed the book too. The contrasting depictions of love really reaches for something deep in the human heart. It also masterfully illustrates how love operates as a Platonic ideal, where our actions and circumstances must fall short of our desires.

Ravelstein. I get it's partially autobiographical, but Bellow seems to have no clear understanding of what the book was supposed to do. In some sense my final thought was 'what a couple of quirky academics', way too superficial a takeaway for a Bellow book.

I'm not familiar with the pictures you're referencing, but annotation should be second nature if you're an active reader. Books should not be one-way conversations. In the course of the argument/explanation, you should be analyzing the turns taken or connections made.

That's probably the most common reason for annotation for me, it makes it easier to go back and analyze the text. Other major reasons: allusion/reference, relation, disagreement, paraphrasing.

Basically, annotation is your side of the conversation with the book, created in the course of reading.

Very interesting perspective. I agree with his criticism of the disclosure/representation distinction, and like the path he takes back into ways of being in the world as the means of retaining truth-aptness.

I do not agree though with his reading of Frege/Russell/Wittgenstein nor with his insistence on subjectivity as the locus of art and thought. I think there's an equivocation here. Frege and the like employ subjectivity formally in descriptions of language usage rather than as actual parameters in making meaning, whereas for the artist subjectivity is an ineluctable feature of the artwork if we're to understand it's logically articulate content as determined to some degree by the artist's experience.

I suppose we can't criticize him too much, since he's an art historian rather than a philosopher. But there's an apparent incongruity between tying linguistic meaning to truth in usage and artistic meaning to truth in usage, which lies in the depth of prefigured structural guideposts in the former which are much more vague (but perhaps also more beautiful) in the latter.