I guess it is partially
cuntrebecca's fault but I have decided to uphold a long satanding tradition of picking up a book I started last year, loved and then lost the time to read and eventually fell out of. It is called Journey To The End Of The Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
I blogged about it on Oct. 16th and read half of it.
Look up that one and then check out the spoilers if you are interested.
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
"Why kid ourselves, people have nothing to say to one another, they all talk about their own troubles and nothing else. Each man for himself, the earth for us all. They try to unload their unhappiness on someone else when making love, they do their damndest, but it doesn't work, they keep it all, and then they start all over again, trying to find a place for it. "You're so pretty, Mademoiselle," they say. And life takes hold of them again until the next time, and they try the same little gimmick. "You're very pretty, Mademoiselle..."
And in between they boast that they have gotten rid of their unhappiness, but everyone knows that it's not true and they've simply kept it all to themselves. Since at that little game you get uglier and more repulsive as you grow older, you can't hope to hide your unhappiness, your bankruptcy any longer. In the end your features are marked with that hideous grimace that takes twenty, thirty years or more to climb from your belly to your face. That's all a man is good for, that and no more, a grimace that he takes a whole lifetime to compose. The grimace a man would need to express his true soul without losing any of it is so heavy and complicated that he doesn't always suceed in completeing it.
and
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
"Take a man and a woman with otherwise equal qualities, you always seem to find a little uneasiness in the man, however stagnant and narrow-minded. This Puta had just a dash of the artist in him. Lot's of men are like that, their artistic learnings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs."
and
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
"People waste a large part of their youth in stupid mistakes. It was obvious that my darling was going to leave me, flat and soon. I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me... and plenty other people...twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them."
and
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
(When referring to a whorehouse
"We went there to grope for our happiness, which all the world was threatening with the utmost ferocity. We were ashamed of wanting what we wanted, but something had to be done for it all the same. Love is harder to give up than life. In this world, we spend our time killing or adoring, or both together. "I hate you! I adore you!" We keep going, we fuel and refuel, we pass on our life to a biped of the next century, with frenzy at any cost, as if it were the greatest of pleasures to perpetuate ourselves, as if, when all's said and done, it would make us immortal. One way or another, kissing is as indispensible as scratching.
I'm going to make another honest attemempt to get back into it. I just need to find a way to make the time.
Guess I'll start now with a cigar, a cup of tea and the front porch.