Vlada’s Reviews > The Midnight Train > Status Update

..the most common regrets of dying. One was wishing they hadn’t worked so hard. And the others were about courage. The courage to be yourself, the courage to express your feelings. They all seem related to letting go of fear… not every stop is a crash.

Ultimately even love was weak against the desire to avoid pain.

He had used work to accelerate his existence, to soften life’s jagged edges into a blur… it gave him meaning and he had loved it. But work - to the excesses he had done it - was also a way to live without living. A way to transfer emotions over to something less personal, something with lower stakes… an attempt to race through time with no weight and substance, but with maximum velocity.

You stand in front of a Da Vinci from, I don’t know, 1498, and it’s powerful because the painting is as it was then. The emotions and feelings of it are fresh. It hasn’t gone off. It is 1498 right there in front of you. The world grows old around art. But the art is still as powerful and fresh as it always was.

I think the trouble with life is we do things because we should. We act for outside eyes. I’m trying it the other way round. To do what feels right deep down even if it shouldn’t be.

Nothing ever just happened.. even the most reckless action was a consequence of what had gone before, just as every loud mistake in the world was the product of some quiet and secret pain.

Chiaroscuro .. is the contrast of light and shade. And renaissance painters were really good at this. Especially Titian. So if you see one of his paintings and you might wonder hot it seems to … shine out at you, and really it’s not about the light, it’s about the dark. .. you need the dark sometimes to make the other things brighter.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it just be lived forwards.