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This book flowed so seamlessly over my consciousness that I read the first 2/3 over the course of 7 hours.
I have an issue with it, but after finishing it today, I still don't quite know how to capture my qualm. Is it in the mundane, steady pace the book takes? Do I just so easily hate most of the characters in their entirely plausible rendered flesh? I want to stand up for him and I want to give him everything he is supposed to have already taken for himself. He does not aim to please unless in alignment with the most natural execution, and he makes nice with his regrets. The remorse that appears from his choices slips into the folds of passing years like the thin paper of the books at his deathbed. He chooses early and often, where he is comfortable and content (re: academia). He feels clumsy and awkward in nearly every other area, which, unfortunately for him, includes love, his family, rivals, and his dignity therein. I am having a hard time deciding if I want the influence of this book in my life, because it answers the question of, "What is the meaning of living?" with simply, "Look! I am alive." And my ego says this cannot be enough.
His prose stacks and mounts into a crescendo reminiscent of George Eliot, which I adored. But the message, the validity of the stoicism, is set so convulsively against everything I aim to pursue that I feel a bit like oil trying to mix with water. Have I bookmarked the hell out of it? Oh absolutely. Did it give? 100%. Am I haunted? As certainly as I know I will read it again.
I have an issue with it, but after finishing it today, I still don't quite know how to capture my qualm. Is it in the mundane, steady pace the book takes? Do I just so easily hate most of the characters in their entirely plausible rendered flesh? I want to stand up for him and I want to give him everything he is supposed to have already taken for himself. He does not aim to please unless in alignment with the most natural execution, and he makes nice with his regrets. The remorse that appears from his choices slips into the folds of passing years like the thin paper of the books at his deathbed. He chooses early and often, where he is comfortable and content (re: academia). He feels clumsy and awkward in nearly every other area, which, unfortunately for him, includes love, his family, rivals, and his dignity therein. I am having a hard time deciding if I want the influence of this book in my life, because it answers the question of, "What is the meaning of living?" with simply, "Look! I am alive." And my ego says this cannot be enough.
His prose stacks and mounts into a crescendo reminiscent of George Eliot, which I adored. But the message, the validity of the stoicism, is set so convulsively against everything I aim to pursue that I feel a bit like oil trying to mix with water. Have I bookmarked the hell out of it? Oh absolutely. Did it give? 100%. Am I haunted? As certainly as I know I will read it again.