I bleached more of my hair and bust up my lip but apart from that my stupid face is still the same.
Over the past week my life has lost a fat chunk of meaning - I've finally finished The Magus and I don't know what to do with myself. Before I get really emo about my life and its lack of direction in any sense of the word, just let me talk about how fucking good The Magus is because, really, how fucking good is The Magus? Poetic, weird, far too clever for its own good - it wooed me. I have fallen in love with a lot of books but this is the first one that has ever wooed me. Some paragraphs would literally make me swoon. This one:
It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
And this:
I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I knew I would never kill myself, I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
And this!
Between skin and skin, there is only light.
How can one man be so capable of reducing the human race to a beautifully realised sentence? How did John Fowles dip into my brain and pull out all of those icky reprehensible feelings we all seem to suffer from? He's going on my list, right up there with Richard Brautigan and Dave Foster Wallace. The true loves of my life.
In other news I am drinking cheap red wine (contained in a plastic bottle, y'all) and worrying about money and getting angry about money and constantly feeling the weight of this giant chip on my shoulder whenever I hear the word wealth. Or read a message from a friend who's moved out of this town. Or drive past the only private school in Northampton. Or even hear the clink two coins make when they hit together. Nothing makes me bitter and old like money does.
I'm alleviating all of the above with alcohol and Freaks & Geeks. I'm focusing on saving up, moving out, still considering Montreal, still considering Berlin, Amsterdam, Mexico, anywhere but the Midlands. Please. When I leave Northampton it has to be for good because if I come back again my life won't ever be mine, it'll be theirs. It'll belong to this town and so will I. I feel like I paid off my debts a long time ago.
