Roy’s Reviews > De romantici > Status Update

I’m happy I told my mother about my experiences with this novel in light of her very early choice of Paustovski’s work as a gift for me. It’ll be all the more meaningful when I finally get to that work. And even more so after she has, eventually, passed away.

If only we could learn about the value of our parents earlier in life. If only I’d realised earlier that she has always understood me more than I knew.

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” — Camus

Perhaps that’s why I’m feeling so tired now.

I want to read, but I need to write.

I’m turning away from myself, still.

The self out of many selves that needs discovering, uncovering the most.

It needs the air, the sea, the woods, to breathe.

I’ve been so blind to the kindnesses given to me.

Numb to the kindnesses.

Because of the pain.

So much sadness is leaving me in reactivating these last dormant muscles in my body, smoking this amount of uncharacteristically unsocial cigarettes, and reading this book.

I know it’s just a meagre way of accounting for the unhealthy behaviour, but there is truth in burning away the pain I carried for so long in smoking these cigarettes.

How I can be so sure?

Because I’m starting to lose the taste for them.

To think my mother gifted me Paustovski’s ‘Goudzand’ for one of my birthdays when I had said, unsure of what exactly I wanted, that I wanted “some proper literature” after having moved on from the Dan Brown-like stuff. To think I was inwardly dismissive of her choice because it wasn’t something I had had in mind. Like Tolstoj. Or Dostoyevsky.

To think I now read Paustovski in such rapture.

Sorry, mom.

It’s great to read with this fervour again, it’s been so long!

It feels like this read is guiding the opening up of my new lifestyle. Interesting.

It’s been ages since I’ve just sat down and read, like I just did now.

Seems like I had to hibernate through winter, too, for a change. It’s only natural. Should’ve done so way earlier.

My reading dry spill seems to be over.