Status Updates From Septology

-Memory no longer shapes the future; with futurity gone, consciousness settles into its foundations.
-The past is revisited not for meaning, but so it no longer has to be carried.
-Relationships and places return as forms of holding, not biography.
-This installment marks release from identity, not reinvention.

'and to him it's unbearable how much the two of them look alike but The Namesake doesn't seem to notice or care, for him it's just like they're two people the same age and that they wear similar clothes and look a little like each other, Asle thinks' p.668

Notes:
-The self is no longer singular or in charge
-Art, memory, & belief are vessels, not destinations
-Ordinary social life becomes impossible once the self thins; how do we belong to worlds we’ve outgrown?
-Mercy replaces meaning

First I was like “oh my god this is so boring shoot me” and then suddenly i realised. now if i have to stop reading this book i might die

'I think, that because pictures have a spirit painting can be compared to praying, that a picture is a prayer, I think, that the pictures I paint are prayer and confession and penance all at once' p.632

Loosening attachments to the identities that once made the present intelligible.
Outgrowing versions of the Self.
Grief as atmosphere (sisters death)
Questions painting, Fosse explore late-life reckoning, “what happens when the practices that once saved no longer feel needed?”
Asle being relieved of the need to ‘be someone’.

Art, Faith, the Loss of Story:
The painting and prayer matter as they are not interpretive acts, but attentive ones.
They do not explain the self.
They keep it present.
Fosse is asking: what if salvation is not a better story, but the courage to live without one?