Connie’s Reviews > Night Train > Status Update
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Connie
is 73% done
"I’m afraid to stay at home alone. There’s no one there, I don’t know what I’d do in an empty apartment. When you get old, the hardest thing to face is yourself."
— Sep 04, 2026 08:23AM
Connie
is 54% done
"Is that bad, not being normal? That just means you’re different from other people. How do you accomplish anything without being different?"
— Sep 04, 2026 06:42AM
Connie
is 50% done
“This is the ideal night train ride, drifting alone through a borderless landscape. The world is a flat, black surface, sliced apart by the even darker train, the wound healing instantly as the world settles back into tranquility.”
— Sep 04, 2026 06:40AM
Connie
is 39% done
"You’re adrift. If you didn’t focus your energy on one book or one essay at a time, you’d have lost your sense of direction long ago."
"Why can’t I just read and think? Why can’t knowledge be a goal in itself?"
“But what is it for?"
— Sep 04, 2026 06:27AM
"Why can’t I just read and think? Why can’t knowledge be a goal in itself?"
“But what is it for?"
Connie
is 24% done
“What is anyone doing with their lives except constantly rearranging things?”
— Sep 03, 2026 06:44AM
Connie
is 20% done
“You could never find such serenity and introspection during the day. When the sun shines on the world, I find it unbelievably chaotic. [...] You can’t even find a piece of ground to sit on peacefully. Why are we all so busy? Why can’t we sit quietly and allow the world to grow large around us? We won’t stop. Each of us wants to run faster than the next.”
— Sep 02, 2026 08:43AM
Connie
is 16% done
"When I was younger, I thought I’d be bored of I didn’t smoke or drink. Now when I feel blue, I just chew on a twig and that’s as good as any cigarette. Drinking DDT doesn’t solve anything—if it does then you don’t have real problems. Isn’t that right? That’s the human condition, there are fewer ways of attaining enlightenment than you imagine."
— Sep 02, 2026 08:24AM
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rated it 5 stars
Sep 01, 2026 08:22AM
“What a refreshing pleasure to slowly burn through the book at twenty pages per second. It feels like the end of a march, his body lightening with each heavy object he puts down, coming back to life inch by inch, returning to himself. The cigarette scorches a black-rimmed hollow right through Songs of Chu, like a creature burrowing through a wall. He turns the pages, looking at the countless holes that make up the big hole, all the work of a single cigarette. What a sense of accomplishment, even more than for the two months he’d spent digesting the book’s contents. Hundreds of pages!”
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“How are you doing?”“Okay.”
“Okay isn’t good enough. You need to study hard and work on having a good attitude. Loneliness, dishonor, humiliation—what do these matter? Did you finish the books I told you to? Good, I’ll give you more. Write up your reflections and send them to me in the next couple of days. It doesn’t matter that you’re just a temp. Wasn’t General Han Xin forced to crawl between the legs of a street thug? They made me cut grass and feed cattle during the Cultural Revolution, and I got through that, didn’t I? Do you think your problems are worse? At least at the university you can learn. Make sure you don’t lose your foreign languages. Get through this, earn your degree, apply for grad school—and no one’s going to care about your past.”