Last night I finally got a moment with Candice in between rushing books and papers. I’ve been reading your tweets, she informs me, and you really have no life. C’est la vie. Even as I type this I’m sitting by the window of a cafe in school, drinking coffee out of a checkered cup and trying to make sense of Plato’s concept of love. (For future reference, if anyone ever tells you they love you platonically..punch them. Because platonic love is confusing.) Sometime last week I found myself awake at 7am and queueing outside the study room before opening hours in an attempt to get a decent table and I realized i had hit an all time low. This is my life now. It is what it is.

In any case, I’m freshly done with my third paper today and all the better for it too- I honestly can’t wait to just finish up this semester and head back to the office. So ironic but there you are! Someone recently requested a list of my favorite reads but that’ll take awhile, so here are some texts i’ve read recently because I (obviously) had to do them for my examinations:

“You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”

The Library of Babel/ Borges. Postmodernist. Short story. Read it here.

“There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.”
/
“You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.”
/
“I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean?

It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius she is ignorant of what she does.”

The Passion/ Winterson. Contemporary (?). Very, very good. Novella. Goodreads Profile.

“Violets and cowshit, my life has been ever thus.”

Birchwood/ Banville. Postmodernist. Novel. Written beautifully. Goodreads Profile.

“What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.”

The Third Policeman/ Flann O’brien. Postmodernist. Hilarious. Goodreads profile.

The thing about literature is, it’s immersive. So many great texts I’ve done this semester but by virtue of the fact that im cramming them all in at once, I consistently feel as though I’m being tossed from identity to identity. It’s disconcerting. It reminds me a bit of Samuel Beckett’s First Love; re: “my thoughts are all of her” – in which the protagonist longs to be with her, so that he is free to think of something other than her. Feels a bit as if all my thoughts are crammed and not my own, feels a bit like i’ve been slowly decanted into the imagination of others with not much left over for myself. If im starting to lose coherence now, that’s alright. It’ll pass. It does that.

One more paper and then- freefalling into frivolity and uselessness. But that’s okay too, I welcome it with open arms. I can’t wait to be sleeping in a bed again instead of slumped over some table, somewhere, waking up to ink marks all over my cheek.

All the best to those of you still being ravaged by the finals!

x
♥jem