Life

Life is interesting. As children, for the most part, we do things based on gut feel. Build a sandcastle, make a tree fort, eat cake for breakfast... and somehow we can get away with it because someone sees how happy it makes us.

As adults, we search for the right thing to do. There's a tendency to cast some dreams aside and search for stability: get a good education, a noble job, pay bills, etc. For me, I have trouble with this stability because it makes me unstable. It has something to do with following a path that seems more defined over the winding path that will make me happier.

I'm taking this winding path as often as I can, now. It makes me feel alive. It makes me appreciate things. It makes me truly happy.

Rules don't make a lot of sense, when it comes to life. They're logical, but so many things are so much better when they're illogical and don't seem to make any sense. There is something about intuition that is truly brilliant, and I'll never really know what it is. To me, that's what's beautiful. I don't want to know. I want to hear about it, but I don't ever want to find the answer because it's just not important. It's important to just be 'in it' as much as you can... to where it comes naturally, and you don't have to fight it at all.

I still have to fight, but I'm getting much better at giving in and doing what I feel like. I find it funny that we spend so much time trying to shed ourselves of childish rationales for our actions, but only when we can go back to it, are we as genuinely happy as we were then.

Vonnegut Dies... so it goes

As stated before, Vonnegut had a special place in my heart because he worked at the same company that I'm currently at, for a good period in his life. He was still able to overcome this, and become a great writer (there is hope :o). Rest in peace, my friend. The following excerpt is from CBS/AP (article is available on the right side of the page).

From CBS/AP:
Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told the AP."

My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."

Darkness Visible | William Golding

You may or may not know that I refuse to read the backs, sideflaps, forewards, etc of any book before I have read it. As such, as soon as I finished Darkness Visible, I read everything I could get my hands on. Reason being: it was so obscure, that I wanted to see if anyone 'got it'.

After reading a bunch of reviews, I found out that people are all over the map on this one. There was only really one person, I more-or-less agreed with.

The book is essentially about a boy named Matty that survives a fire and is scarred for life. As a child, he witnesses the death of a school acquaintance and is blamed for it by his child-molesting teacher. Matty never gets over the thought of letting his teacher down. He becomes very religious, and experiments with the idea of divinity as well as the occult (it is not known for sure, which he embraces more).

The parrallel story involves two twins, who grew up quite wholesomely, it seems. Sophy, the less attractive of the two, continues to vie for her father's attention (who is preoccupied with finding a wife). She ends up despising her father, moving in with a thief and getting into sexual and unlawful mischief involving kidnapping of children of political figures.

Anyway, the book is interesting... and the theme around 'vieing for attention from role models' seems to be central to the novel, IMO. Terrorist & sexual mischief all seem to stem from this central theme. There is an attempt to explain the darkness of man, and how people are governed by this impulse that they cannot explain or fight... they find themselves doing what the darkness tells them to. It's interesting, but not explained very well by Golding.

Overall, I give this book a 3/5.