Pariap’s Reviews > Leaving the Atocha Station > Status Update

“because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction”

[These periods of rain or periods between rains in which I was smoking and reading Tolstoy would be,impossible to narrate,and that impossibility entered the experience:the particular texture of my loneliness derived in part from my sense that I could only share it,could only describe it,as pure transition,a slow dissolve between scenes,as boredom,my projects uneventful third phase,possessed of no intrinsic content.]

“having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.”

“I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change.”