Status Updates From Notti insonni

J. suffered in his loves from seizures of optimism, a blighting frenzy quite unknown to me. A meeting, an attraction, aroused in him a rich, agitated possessiveness. He rushed into the future with the first glance, swept along by a need for connection that extended the moment before it had begun. He was one of those who look into new eyes and say: Now I am going to be happy.

what a pleasure it is to spend 2+ hours poring over ten pages of metaphor, lush and biting with wit. repetitive & rambling in only the best ways—a true journey, i mean. i do love a little book that says more with less.

I read this book in grad school and I thought that I would like it more when I returned to it. I didn’t, but that probably says more about me than the book. I did appreciate some of the sentences more than I imagine I did at the time. It’s a good book to read every couple of decades.

There’s a particular kind of melancholy in reading this one. It feels like watching someone sift through the fragments of her past, not quite trying to reconstruct a life so much as revisiting all the different lives she has lived within it. It’s nostalgic without ever feeling sentimental, and I love how the book makes memory feel both intimate and strangely elusive.