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

“Many people, I believed, used similar drugs to remove themselves from their experience, but because, for as long as I could remember, I always already felt removed from my experience, I took the drug to intensify the vantage from said remove, and so experienced it as an intensification of presence, but only at my customary distance from myself; maybe, when I panicked, that distance was collapsing.”

[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.”