Status Updates From Avalon: Roman | "Nell Zink ...

I felt the darkness approaching—the fog of banality, the stubborn inadequacy of human life. The metaphysical gravity that tears down beauty, calls love dependence, cannot tolerate complexity

Surfing a term like “Klaus Theweleit” or “Xavière Gauthier” can give you a long ride.

Mark and Susan had taken in an ugly duckling and bargained for a swan, not a better-looking duck — that is, a college girl who would sprout wings and fly away, not a working-class lodger.

Screenwriting leaves de facto zero latitude for creativity. It’s like a programming language. Skip a beat, and it won’t compile.

I turned off my phone and read my new book. I had to read every sentence at least ten times, meditating over paragraphs like mantras, until their meaning suddenly appeared.
“There is no right life in the wrong one,” for instance. That was how Adorno denied the possibility of human happiness in functionalistic housing projects with crappy furniture.

I decided that her feelings were like one of those rogue waves near the Cape of Good Hope, when a combination of random sloshing from all directions piles up into a pyramid a hundred feet high and swamps a tanker.

Jay could confirm that he had said, “Marriage is commitment to a future without futurity.” His fiancée should be static while he remained dynamic, like me. But that also made us too volatile to get close to each other. Intimacy might blow us apart, and our future would be shared at opposite ends of the universe.

[...] Walden [...] is about how people with money lead lives of quiet desperation.