Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney

Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral.

Peter first introduction is marveling at his brother’s adolescence 😔.

The will to live so much stronger than anyone imagines. Like a kind of death, what happened. A kind of death you survive out of politeness, respect for others, out of selfless love. Christ also survived his own death. And was dignified and exalted.

oh Sylvia :(

He went to one of her lectures in the spring. Slender woman at the top of the room talking about eighteenth-century prose forms. Every pair of eyes fixed on her. Voice very clear and low-toned. Contralto. Not another sound in the place. When she was finished, they all broke out in applause, what, two hundred of them, more, and she smiled and nodded, used to it, probably. Sheer charisma.

mercy.

Had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning. All very well as far as it goes, the question of constitutionality arises, and so on. Couldn’t go to work in the morning if he didn’t think something meant something meant something else. But what is it all leading up to. An end without an ending.

what if this was my last straw ??

And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?

it’s only chapter 2…..