less larger than life

21 November 2006

10:28 PM

"Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre."

"I rise to conversation, because conversation is my only recreation.
In a sense I was prepared, and in a way one never is."

Finished Philip Roth's Everyman. I almost couldn't sleep after it.

Roth's Everyman is godless and nameless; even the book looks like death. But it was a nice read I guess. The thing with reading about dying is it reminds you to keep living, like reading about death reminds you that you are alive.

"oh I'm sorry, truly. I abhore tears."

"We all do," he told her, "but we cry anyway."

She wept uncontrollably.
"Do you know why she's carrying on like that?"

it's because life's most disturbing intensity is death.
it's because death is so unjust.
it's because once one has tasted life, death does not even seem natural.

i have thought- secretly i was certain- that life goes on and on.

"Well, you're wrong.

She's like that because she isn't 18 anymore."

-

but how it appeared that like any number of elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less, and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than what he was -

the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing.

this is how it works, he thought, this is what you could not know.

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