Paromita’s Reviews > Kinder Than Solitude > Status Update

...Once and again we lie to ourselves about starting with a clean slate, but even the most diligent wiping leaves streaks—fears, distrusts, the necessity of forever questioning the motives of others.

How does anyone know anything about another person? Our mind, a slate that does not begin as large as we wish, grows smaller with what we believe to be experience: anything we put down has to be erasable, one passion making way for another, one connection replaced by an equally precarious one...

Could he explain to Sizhuo that sometimes death was a mercy—that it was worse for the dead to go on living? In an ideal world, death should be the end of the story, but in this world, where they had to make do with muddles, death never ended anything neatly.

Why, thought Boyang with a weary sadness, couldn’t people stay in a place they could not name, rather than wanting to know, always wanting to know, more of the truth? Everything comes to an end when explained, rightly or wrongly.

Call it youthful conceit, but to be seen—and to be seen as someone with a past and a future—is that not our most sincere design for love? Our greediest, too: in wishing for such continuity, one places oneself—with arrogance and delusion—beyond the erosion of time.

Yet how could she explain that being on her own—and not someone’s property—was the only thing she had wanted? Once upon a time, she had been her parents’ possession, however momentarily, and after that she had belonged to her grandaunts, in whose minds she had belonged more to their god than to them; all sorts of people had since tried to claim her, but to stay unclaimed was to be never disowned again.

If she (Ruyu) had ever felt anything close to passion, it was a passion of the obliterating kind: any connection made by another human being, by accident or by intention, had to be erased; the void she maintained around herself was her only meaningful possession.

Those who are lied to are the ones to whom truth matters, don’t you think?

She was not the only one trapped by life. She was afraid of meeting another person like her, but more than that she was afraid of never meeting another person like her, who, however briefly, would look into her eyes so that she knew she was not alone in her loneliness.

Life, in retrospect, can be as simple as a collection of anecdotes, and anecdotally we live on, trading our youthful belief in happiness—and at that age happiness almost always means being good, being right, and being loved—for the belief in feeling less, suffering little.