:: le silence du monde avant les mots, part 3 ::

subtitle: OR, LITERARY DEVICES AND CONFUSION.
confusion. the power of gordon-levitt.

as I was taking my (copious) notes on what I thought of the actual plot and storyline, I also took (copious) notes on what seemed to be symbols and development and themes and stuff. I am not good at "symbols and development and themes and stuff" but I also know you improve only with practice, and this was sort of interesting to me, and I can't find much on night train anywhere else so I might as well be first.
   woo.

one huge -- and unfortunately blatant -- motif in this book was that of sight. seeing is hugely important to raimund gregorius (whom I will call RG), at first for the physical reason of reading; as the story progresses, his physical sight comes to reflect the acuity of his spiritual & emotional sight, how well he sees and understands not only himself but those with whom he interacts.
   the progression is most obvious in gregorius's glasses. the books begins in switzerland, where he wears his ordinary, comfortable, habitual glasses, the prescription of which he obtained from an old greek doctor-friend; when he reaches portugal, the glasses are knocked off and shatter. he happens to have a backup, but also gets a new prescription from an optometrist in lisbon, and the new glasses frighten him with their newness and clarity and precision. at first he hides behind his old glasses and refuses to use the new, but gradually 'outgrows' the old and abandons their use altogether. below are my original and -- except for a few cases of clarification -- undedited thoughts :)

"'nor was he uninformed, like a blind shut-in.' could it be: he wears glasses to read to better understand the world. his first pair is smashed (as his mind is opened by this book and he breaks out of his normal routine) & he acquires a second, new pair -- but he still fears blindness (i.e. ignorance and human disconnect). ... Doxiades. THE GREEK. DUH!! ...D helps him to see when in switzerland. senhora eça helps him to see in lisbon. from greek to portuguese. & then there is 'something' between RG & D -- a break in their relationship because of the break RG has had with his old life. and his new glasses seem 'importunate, even threatening in their new clarity.' he struggles to choose between them. either way, both will change how others see him. outside & inside worlds again; understanding of self in the context of (outside) world as well." and then I quoted:

"but the world was closer and more oppressing, it demanded more of you, but its demands weren't clear. when they became too much for him, these obscure demands, he retreated behind the old lenses that kept everything at a distance and allowed him to doubt whether there really was an outside world beyond words and texts, a doubt that was dear to him and without it he couldn't imagine life at all. but he could no longer forget the new view either and in a little park, he took out Prado's notes and tried the new glasses.

   YEAH?! IT'S ALL ABOUT SEEING."

later, when gregorius is on his way home to bern, he has a serious spell of dizziness. these have been occurring sporadically throughout the book, but now they're getting bad and it's scaring him. he wakes up (on the train; this is important) and he tries to reassure himself with greek words. "greek, the security, the static, the old, the untouchable, immutable. he worries about resuming this old life, this cramped, untravelled blindness (as he can't resume his old glasses; as A[medeu] de P[rado] discusses in ch. 24 on travel) exactly because he doesn't want 'the time of his stay [to] be destroyed': to reassume a life of 'infinite possiblity' is one thing, but trying to fit in a small mold, when you have expanded, a whole different one. yet that is what RG is doing: reassuring his new self with the security of the old."
   and telling, in the context of glasses, is the quote on page 424: "I want to go through life unknown. the blindness of others is my safety and my freedom."

next: obviously, of course, trains will be important since they even function in the title. right away, I noticed a passing mention of a poster for a movie that gregorius likes -- a movie he's never seen, but whose title intrigues him: l'homme qui regardait passer les trains, or 'the man who watched the trains'. I started to formulate this theory in my head that the trains symbolized life. at one point prado (the doctor) writes an essay on life and travel, and he compares living to a night train, rushing along to its destination -- fast, furious, unstoppable, hard to understand, and headed for a "last tunnel" from which we will not emerge. a few chapters later I wrote this:

   "so who is 'the man who watches the trains'? [prado] &/or in a deeper sense, RG?
   in a sense, RG, because he has not, in P's sense, been riding one: he has watched it pass him by. and [he has watched] P's in particular: he went to lisbon & has seen this man pass before him through his own words and the words of others.
   but even more so, I think, is 'the man' P: because he has learned about himself in watching others.
   ...as RG is doing now. [and I literally drew a frowny confused face]" 

I'm very decisive, as you can tell. and so good at deciphering deeper literary meanings.
"the portuguese- and french-speaking lady: it all comes together in her. foil? to the red-coat lady, she reads le silence du monde avant les mots on the slow train because 'nowhere else was she so open to new things.'"
   anyway, whatever I thought I understood was apparently confirmed, not too long after. I wasn't being super clear, but I think it had to do with the title.
  
"chapter 12's note, 'fleeting faces in the night,' totally corroborates my 'l'homme...' theory. for both men, their lives were going towards that 'last tunnel' -- as are all of us -- & both were casting 'fleeting, rushed looks at the others sitting behind dull glass in the dim light' as they feel their own train rushing faster than they want it to. both feel in the dark (night train), both hope to end in a place of fulfillment or understanding -- for P, the place he couldn't leave, for which he was always homesick, & for RG, the place he sought when nothing else offered the right security & where he found the most answers: for both men, lisbon.
   I knew trains were important."

surprisingly, I didn't write anything categorically about travel. travel makes its way into my discussions of other things, but I didn't really focus on it (although there were a lot of things I didn't focus on that I could have. books. smoking. chess. love, and which aspects of it the four women in his life represented (from the "desire, security, pleasure" quote). is prado a vampire of life, and is his career as a doctor a subconscious way he battles himself -- and who are his victims? all things to ponder, but not here).
   travel, I feel, is a very important part of the book, especially since the story is predicated on gregorius's trip to lisbon. sure, it mirrors his inward journey to self-knowledge, but I can't believe it just ends there. what about his trip to finisterre, and how does gregorius provide the foil for prado? is it that he is more adventuresome, more willing to break out of his mold; somehow free to leave the place of his own security, as prado is not? this is frustrating. anne, I want to know!

finally, weather (trust me, I'm almost done). ever since thomas foster stressed the importance of weather in these sorts of books, I've been overanalyzing like freud for anything of slight meteorological significance. again, it's pretty obvious -- and again, unfortunately -- that rain and snow mean something, but this is one thing I never really figured out. is it more than the typical rain = youth, growth, renewal? I don't know. definitely open to input on this one.

- "what is it when the rain turns to snow as RG leaves for geneva?"
- "doxiades's words give RG 'the courage to make this trip, despite the snow that started falling in bern.' ?? snow again."
- "'was he still mundus, the myopic bookworm, who had gotten scared only because a few snowflakes had fallen in bern?' SNOW. ??"
- "and as he enters the clinic, it starts raining. I need to understand this rain. 'at the entrance to the clinic, gregorius turned around and waved. then he went in. as the door closed behind him, it started raining.'"

a week later I came back and wrote this.
"POSTULATION. IF the rain symbolizes new life & growth -- say RG's when he was young & had life before him -- then the snow could conceivably scare him because it represents his own age, his own withering & the coldness of his life & freezing of his spirit. so he's scared and wants to get away, to a place of sun & youth, to find his deepest self -- perhaps the one part of him that does not grow old?
   it is at the end of the earth (the end of himself & his knowledge) that P loses hope. and it is the same place where RG discovers human companionship -- accompanied by 'sun, wind, and words'."

- - -
very conclusive, am I not? < I can't even conclude one freaking blog post without a question.
I would like to have all the answers.
I would love to be able to read something once, put it down with a satisfied sigh, and thereafter be able to explain in depth all the deeper meanings, symbols, motifs, themes, and devices used in the book to anyone with the inclination to listen. no, not to impress them, but because I want to understand it. there is so much knowledge and insight out there, I want to glean as much of that from as many sources as possible.
   sure, I won't agree with it all, but it will challenge me. the problem is, how can my mind grow and expand -- as john waters asked this week: "isn't that what college is for?" -- if I don't get what is trying to be said?

on the bright side, to just about everyone I'm still a baby. barely out of our teens, most of my contemporaries don't even know where they're headed (I am just extraordinarily lucky that way). I don't need to have everything figured out at this point -- not even everything in the books I read. I guess it would be nice to publish organized, insightful thoughts here on this one-faceted representation of me; but I need to remember these messy, unclear thoughts come closer to being who I am at this moment than any well-crafted and, haha, professional article could, no matter how I wish I could present myself.
 
   and guess what? peter bieri actually mentioned this.
   "life is not what we live. it's what we imagine living."

:: le silence du monde avant les mots, part 2 ::

home is the sailor, home from the sea, and I am home from california. (it was lovely.) taxiing down the runway, moments before we lifted off the ground, I realized that this was actually happening. it was a thrilling moment -- pushed backwards into my seat, the earth falling away behind us, I was on the way to my beloved california for a gorgeous wedding.
   because I've experienced the 'wow' realization factor, this really made sense:

"and there, all of a sudden, he realized that he was in fact making this trip -- that it wasn't only a possibility, something he had thought up on a sleepless night and that could have been, but something that really and truly was taking place. and the more space he gave this feeling, the more it seemed to him that the relation of possibility and reality were beginning to change."

lately I've been pleasantly surprised by the changing of "the relation of possibility and reality". more than just california trips, life in general has seemed so much more wide open and free: my "life may be all it promises," and that possibility is breathtaking to consider.

why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions within themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.

this idea of travel grips me. I may or may not agree with it, but it's a beautiful thought: wherever we go, we leave some part of us -- so that when we return to a place, we reassume that self, that life and its promise that we'd left behind. and "what could be more exciting than resuming an interrupted life with all its promises?"

um, yes, we are back to night train. (part one is available here.)

pascal mercier/peter bieri believes that "there [is] no greater distinction between people" than whether they are a reader or a nonreader.
   I feel you, brother.
   also, I definitely feel that it is hard to understand people who don't love to read -- partly due to my own obsession (you're different? what?? how can you?!) and partly because I can't imagine what it is like to be someone else, in all literal-ness. I try, of course, but we all have our own idea of even what 'understanding' someone else is, and it's all based foundationally on whom we ourselves are.
   I love mercier's thoughts on this. [he's writing about seeing his own reflection in a window, and at first not recognizing himself, but judging the apparent stranger on first glance.]

is it the same with others: that they don't recognize themselves in their outside? that the reflection seems like a stage set full of crass distortion? that, with fear, they note a gap between the perception others have of them and the way they experience themselves? that the familiarity of inside and the familiarity of outside can be so far apart that they can hardly be considered familiarity with the same thing?... even the outside world of an inside world is still a piece of our inside world, not to mention the thoughts we make about the inside world of strangers and that are so uncertain and unstable that they say more about ourselves than about others.

   so person A sees person B. A interprets B through A's own lens, a double distortion: B is presenting himself as B either wants or cannot help, but that may not articulate B's real self; while A sees and interprets that projection through A's own distorted understanding, just by being A.
   for between us there is not only the deceptive outside world, but also the delusion that exists of it in every inside world. persons A and B see the same outside world -- by "see" I mean "perceive" -- differently because of whom they are, differently, inside.
   isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their own imaginations? ... that was also true of looks. looks weren't there and were read. looks were always looks read into. only as read into did they exist.
   like, it's a wonder any two humans get along at all, ever.

when we talk about ourselves, about others, or simply about things, we want -- it could be said -- to REVEAL ourselves in our words: we want to show what we think and feel. ...[but] not only do we reveal ourselves with our words, we also betray ourselves. we give away a lot more than we wanted to reveal, and sometimes it's the exact opposite. and the others can interpret our words as symptoms for something we ourselves may not even know. as symptoms of the sickness of being us. it can be amusing when we regard others like this, it can make us more tolerant, but also put ammunition in our hands. and the moment we start speaking, if we think that others are doing the very same thing with us, the word can stick in our throat and fear can make us mute forever. 

   words. words are so important.

"'so the word is the light of men,' [silveira] said. 'and so things exist properly only when they are grasped in words.'
'and the words have to have a rhythm,' said gregorius. 'a rhythm as the words have in st. john, for example. only then, only when they are poetry, do they really shed light on things. in the changing light of the words that same things can look quite different.'"
   and as gregorius reads: you know, thinking is the second most beautiful thing. the most beautiful thing is poetry. if there were poetic thinking and thinking poetry -- that would be paradise.

but as without words you can't have a worthwhile book -- or any kind of book, really -- nor can you have a book that doesn't deal with love and/or death. yup, you know it's coming.
   in a way, I think gregorius's new realizations of the world around him are prompted by approaching death: the reality that life is finite and he is sitting still in a moving world, watching others pass. [this is an important topic; possibly The most important topic in the book, and so I will devote part three in this series to the symbols and themes and my closing thoughts on all of it (probably erroneous but so good to get off my chest).]
   a little necessary story background: the main character, raimund gregorius, travels to lisbon on a freak whim and ends up spending his time researching the life of dr. amadeus de prado, who also wrote a philosophical book-thing. RG has come across this book and he falls in love with it and wants to find out more about its author; along the way, he also finds out more about himself. ...duh. excerpts from the main book are in quotes, but I've italicized the book-within-the-book quotes for clarity; although since I didn't explain that till now, you're probably super-confused. I don't blame you.
 
   so. love, argues dr. prado in his book, is made of three more or less transient emotions/feelings: desire, pleasure, and security -- but he also holds that love cannot last because feelings cannot last. they cannot weather life and stay intact.
   "that's why loyalty was important. it was not a feeling, he thought, but a will, a decision, a partisanship of the soul. something that turned the accident of encounters and the contingency of feelings into a necessity. a breath of eternity, he said, only a breath, but all the same."

themes of transience, death and the fear of death, consistently recur, perhaps because love and loyalty are such struggles for prado. one of his most important relationships, his best-friendship with a man named jorge, falls apart seemingly inexplicably. this crushes him. when gregorius tracks jorge down, the man tells him, "I'm glad I have the pharmacy. I can live there in our friendship. and occasionally I succeed in thinking that we never lost each other. that he just died."
   as both the book and prado's life draw to an end, he starts thinking more about loneliness, meaning, death and the Living's reaction to it. his best friend has a crisis at one point, before their friendship ends, and he starts to consider it: jorge had always wanted -- always planned -- on learning how to play the piano. somehow he has come up with the number of years it would take to become concert-pianist proficient at it, but one night it hits him that he's too old. he won't, in all probability, live long enough to make it to the end of those years, and it scares him. he is terrified and helpless.

the bright awareness of finitude that assaulted Jorge in the middle of the night and that I have to inflame in many of my patients with the words announcing the fatal diagnosis to them, disturbs us like nothing else because often without knowing it, we live toward such wholeness and because every moment we live to the fullest draws its liveliness from the fact that it represents a piece of the puzzle of that unknown wholeness. if the certainty befalls us that it will nevermore be achieved, this wholeness, we suddenly don't know how to live the time that can no longer be part of a whole life. that is the reason for a strong, distressing experience of some of my doomed patients: they no longer know what to do with their time, however short it has become.

prado addresses this same thing again, many chapters later, hoping to have fundamentally understood the human fear of death.

the fear that life remained incomplete, a torso; the awareness of no longer being able to become the one we aimed to be. that's how we had finally interpreted the fear of death. but how, I asked, can the missing wholeness and coherence of life be feared when it's not experienced at all as soon as it has become an irrevocable fact? [if life, when done, isn't to our living satisfaction, what does it matter: we are dead.] ...why don't I want to know what I thought and wrote back then? whence this indifference? is it indifference? or is the loss greater, deeper? to want to know how one thought before and how it became what one thinks now: that, too, if it existed, was also part of the wholeness of life. so had I lost what makes death fearsome? the belief in a coherence of life worth struggling for and which we try to wrest from death?

he takes a final trip, alone, to finisterre (in spain. robert service wrote a great poem about the finistère in france, if you're interested). here at the end of his life, at the end of relationships, at the end of his hope and belief in anything, at the end of the earth, he really comes to terms with the emptiness of existence he has reasoned himself into.

finis terrae. never have I been so awake as there, and so sober. since then, I know: my race is at an end. a race I didn't know I was running, always. a race without rivals, without purpose, without reward. wholeness? espejismo, say the spaniards. I read the word in the newspapers on those days, it's the only one I still know. mirage. fata morgana. our life, those are fleeting formations of quicksand, formed by one gust of wind, destroyed by the next. images of futility that blow away even before they are properly formed. 

:: ttyl ::

my best friend is getting married on saturday and I am again flying out to california for that. today.
today, as in, less than five hours from now I will be in the air.

I'm maybe a little excited.

anyway, because I've been preparing for this and scholarships and doing internship things, and have no plans to stop any of those things for a while, I'm taking a little break from this imaginary sector of my life. for those of you waiting with bated breath for my world/words post part two, it will of necessity be a little longer. possess your soul in patience.

:: le silence du monde avant les mots, part 1 ::

"I am only on page 15 of night train to lisbon, but I'm already blown away by it. perhaps because I so relate to gregorius in his wanting to do something new -- crazy, different -- with himself and his life.
   I love the first sentence -- it grabbed me, with its brilliant backwardness:

The day that ended with everything different in the life of Raimund Gregorius began like countless other days.

it's sheer genius."

I recently finished peter bieri (as pascal mercier)'s book night train to lisbon, obviously. it made me think and consider and overall, I appreciate its insight. I finished it about three weeks ago, but I haven't stopped thinking about it, so it seemed appropriate to write something word-vomit-y because that always clears my head (sorry for yours).
   although I hesitated to write this, actually. I had enough reservations about the book to begin with, and then when I looked into what other people had to say, I felt dumb for liking even what I did (most of the reviews were negative). but then I realized, I am my own person, and I can like what I like, without being afraid of what people will think of me.
 
I took notes as I read -- personal notes, in my personal journal. they weren't written to be read by others and I don't write very professionally when it's only to myself ever (though let's face it, I'd try harder if this blog weren't just an extension of that self-talk); but it has my thoughts down better. so this is going to be a compilation of those thoughts and my now, at-this-moment thoughts as well.

   one and a half caveats. this book was translated from german, and sweet baby buttercream, the translator sucked. I think night train might have made a top spot in my favorites if it had just been written a little better -- the wording was really, really choppy in a lot of places. it was heavy and plodding, with weird words mixed together. I wish I'd written down an example, but the translator used intellectual words by slang words, in the same sentence; like if you said, "her pulchritude was on fleek." and it was like that all the time. not all of either category and not consistently (per character or something), so the result was kind of unsettling -- maybe the uncanny valley for writing, ha.
   caveat.5: while I was intrigued by some symbols, in some cases it seemed a little too much. too many symbols, too obviously... although I do like to chalk it up to bad translation. because who actually knows? not me! this part is in german, and we don't understand it.

   

but aside from these technical, writing problems, the content resonated with me.

   what I immediately noticed was something that scarily echoed my thoughts on march 21st.
[on march 21st, I wrote: "in this case, it's the latin that speaks to me -- latin can be austerely, expressively beautiful sometimes. like the letters that became roman script, the original trajan font: austere & immoveable & unchanging & beautiful in their untouchable aloofness.

   now I'm getting wordy."]

I was thinking about latin, & this is what mercier has to say about it: 

he loved the latin sentences because they bore the calm of everything past. because they didn't make you say something. because they were speech beyond talk. and because they were beautiful in their immutability.

what's crazy to me is that reading this book is like reading my own thoughts in someone else's words. it's eerie and thrilling; it's exciting and a relief, like the tear-raising response that carl rogers wrote about, when you feel understood.
   this relating to the text makes it hard for me to dislike the book -- it's like disapproving of me. which is weird. 

I'd like to go back to those minutes in the schoolyard when the past had dropped off of us and the future hadn't yet begun. time came to a halt and held its breath as it never again did. ...or is it the wish -- the dreamlike, bombastic wish -- to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now?
   there's something peculiar about this wish, it smacks of paradox and logical peculiarity. because the one who wishes it isn't the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. instead, it is the one masked by the future become past who wants to go back to the past, to revoke the irrevocable. and would he want to revoke it if he hadn't suffered it? to sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap -- it's the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself -- the one marked by events -- along on this journey. ... but then, if he [the younger me] had [made the choices I now wish he/I had made], he wouldn't have become a man who would later wish to return to the previous crossroads. can I wish myself to be him? I don't think I could be satisfied to be him. but this satisfaction can be mine only because I am not him, only as the fulfillment of wishes that aren't his. 

 ^this fascinates and disturbs me. fascinates because I love the thought of what makes me me & the fact that, were I a different me, that me would see me as me and be just as foreign to me as I would be to me. or it. 

   unfortunately, this is exactly what mama was saying back on february 17th: 'when you change you'll be fine with "you". you won't miss whom you were.' anyway, off the topic of mama being right (AGAIN) it also disturbs me, because

1: that kind of thinking & reasoning can get frustratingly circular & convoluted & ultimately petty and

2: it's ultimately petty and

3: I don't understand it.   

   like, theoretically I do, but at the same time, I can't fathom it. the human mind (or at least mine, that can't run 'firmly and accurately' through the alphabet to K, much less Q) can't formulate the two distinct mes that would be without dragging the one that is into the wrong equation. 

   but seriously, folks. really, what does it matter what we might have been? and here's where the pettiness comes in. being anything other than what we are is impossible & not as fabulous as it sounds. it's always that way; life's like that. we'll never be content. so we can reason ourselves around & around & question what makes us us, & what would be different if we weren't us but somebody else...and yet we can't change anything, and we can't even know, so why does it even matter. like, it's interesting, but it's nonsense. really, truly nonsense disguised by big words & falsely mysterious, grandiose thoughts. 

   yet I'm enthralled. I've thought about these same quirks of being thousands of times myself, so to hear them from someone else is in one way revolutionary and in another cozily familiar. I know these thoughts. I've thought them.
 
but it's more, it means more to me than just a weird thought-version of déjà vu -- it goes deeper, because I've never been able to articulate thoughts very well at all. I've felt it, but here it is, expressed. it gives me a voice somehow.

what could, what should be done with all the time now before us, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty?

I wonder about growing up. I am, right now, in the spot 'when the past dropped off of us & the future hadn't yet begun'; in gregorius's words, 'how much life [I] still have before [me]; how open [my] future still is; how much can still happen to [me]; how much [I] can still experience!' I don't want that to go to waste, and I want to live now -- choose my forked path now -- as I try to imagine both later mes would wish.
 
   being me me, though, and unable to state something without qualifying that statement, I immediately started doubting myself and my enthusiasm.
   I wrote in my journal, "the things is...we're back to pettiness. am I getting wrapped up in this retarded, 'deep' crap because I'm 19 and 3/4 & totally naive & totally too open to crazy ideas? no, I don't even mean that, because the kind of 'crazy ideas' I mean I want to always be open to. but am I too accepting -- too gullible -- & being schnookered by fancy words of wind that make me feel like a deep thinker while saying 1: nothing new or even originally spinning something old and 2: nonsense to fool vain (shall I say) autodidacts* into thinking they're very intellectual philosophical thinkers?
   and why am I thinking about this, and why do I care? basically, I'm becoming afraid that I will swallow the truth with the untruth & grow up to laugh at my foolish impressionable intellectualism that really was nothing & had nothing.
   I have nothing."

*this guy has some interesting things to say, but he seems kind of arrogant, which turns me off; and he refers to himself as an "autodidact", which I tried to subtly mock here. I had written in my journal a few weeks earlier about something he wrote, and referred to that in this entry. but sorry, that stays locked; I'm not recording all my private thoughts for the world here on the never-deleted internet.    

it's a hard balance, reading secular books like these and loving the theoretical what-are-we, where-are-we-going hypotheses, but trying to stay focused on the truth. yet there are plenty of things the Bible doesn't address, doesn't answer, and I think in that category of question marks are equally plenteous things we are free to speculate on. consider the harmless question: how do our perceptions of us differ from how others perceive us... and how do our perceptions of us affect theirs? (I'll talk about this more next post. mercier has some fascinating thoughts.) in some ways, that's not just harmless and neutral, but positively a great thing to consider, because it can totally make us more empathetic, thoughtful of other people, interested in and at peace with them -- "as far as it depends on you." and I thought about that:

"please note I am still thinking of all this in a purely secular light. providence & sovereignty & eternity are all very true things that I believe fully answer all these questions; but I like to ponder them theoretically. again, though: these questions, these statements -- 'he would have to be quite different from me...' -- are so unrealistic as to be contrived. contrived & therefore fake, shallow, & petty.
   do I become that by thinking about these things?"

you are what you eat, after all.

"perhaps I am fake & shallow & petty & contrived, just as the book is. but I relate to it, all the same.
   'all the same.' ha. what I mean is, perhaps we are the same, and that is why I relate."

reading over my thoughts again and being able to dissect them in my own mind as I copy them is showing me, no, I'm not shallow and petty. (I mean, this is what I think, not that I'm absolutely not. not that I'm not to other people. as for contrived? maybe, sometimes... :)) I think I am an over-analyzer and worried about growing up and knowing what is right and what is wrong. I made a good point when I realized I'm only 19 and 3/4 (although now, I'll be 20 TOMORROW. woo!!): I am still a kid, and I'm still discovering and learning and understanding. I'll never know everything, and I'm still early on in learning anything. how much life I still have before me!

I have a lot more thoughts on this book, so until next time.

of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one, at most, and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, its melody.    then, when we turn to these treasures, as archaeologists of the soul, we discover how confusing they are. the object of contemplation refuses to stand still, the words bounce off the experience and in the end, pure contradictions stand on the paper.