Audrey > Recent Status Updates

Toska (Russian): according to Nabokov's translation of the Afro-Russian writer Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, it is "a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause... a longing with nothing too long for."

Fernweh (German): "a longing and homesickness for a place you have never been."

Dense read, so slow-going. The nature of the subject makes for a lot of unfamiliar nomenclature, which can be difficult to keep track of, especially as it simultaneously keeps a disjointed timeline. I feel like I need to start taking notes to keep it all straight.

I was so hooked after reading just the preface last night that I ordered it from Amazon this morning. I have a feeling it's one I'll want to mark up and reference repeatedly. Now I remember why it was so high on my list. Plus it & another are already overdue at the library, so I'll read the other and get them both back while I wait on it!

The more I read, the more the tears fall... "We're supposed to sentence people fairly after fully considering their life circumstances, but instead we exploit the inability of the poor to get the legal assistance they need - all so we can kill them with less resistance.... Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right?"

Well at least it's moving past the whiny, nihilistic phase into something resembling an actual plot. Fiction or not, I'm not a big fan of the writing style. It's like the whole thing is just trying too hard. Maybe it will get better as the antagonist's mental health improves.

"There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else. Eventually someone brave and stupid will come along and try to fill that hole. But it never works, and so instead, that selfless soul winds up with a gap in his heart, too. And so on. It's a miracle that anyone survives, when so much us is missing."