Nothing really makes sense.

I decided to ride my emotions to their ends instead of trying to moderate them. I have so many. I understand (so much more than I did before) what Foer meant when he wrote one of his characters' childhoods in these terms:

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Every day I felt less.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

I don't remember the page number, but the book is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and I think that I could be that girl, crying about everything tiny, acutely feeling the small tragedy of existing at all.

I think I wrote a paper to this effect once, but I don't remember any of it, and I don't think I meant then the extent of what I mean now.

It's difficult. I want to cry about so much--even the rustling of paper, even the silence between and question and its response, even the green of my copy of Mrs. Dalloway because it is such a vibrant lime-chartreuse, because the front of the cover is rough and the inside is smooth and---

Doesn't really make sense. I know, I know, I know, I know. But still I believe myself, the way I believe Woolf when she wrote these thoughts for Mrs. Dalloway:

Big Ben struck the half-hour.

How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching to see the old lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell, making the moment solemn. She was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move, to go--but where? Clarissa tried to follow her as she turned and disappeared, and could still just see her white cap moving at the back of the bedroom. She was still there, moving about at the other end of the room. Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that's the miracle, that's the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of draws to dressing-table. She could still see her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn't believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

The page number for that is 140-141, but maybe only in the Penguin Popular Classics edition--in any case, "here was one room; there another." What could Woolf possibly have meant by that, and yet I think I get it (if only in my own personal way), and yet it seems so plausible--Mrs. Dalloway's thought.

I'm just overwhelmed, I think, not that I can really justify it. Just: Colors. Eating. Gravity. Expectations. Glances. Age. A room next to another. How can it all be possible? And my emotions--the melancholy of a lazy afternoon, the delight of a brother singing off-key.

I am so influenced by the literature I read.

Everything, Illuminated.

Rereading one of my favorite books.

Three passages I never forgot, even though it'd been four years since I lay crying and crumpled in my bed at home (so much distance and time traversed since then, but I am essentially the same soppy mess, no?):

1. 4.517--The dream of falling in love, marriage, death, love. This dream seems as if it lasts for hours, although it always takes place in the five minutes between my returning from the field and being woken up for dinner. I dream of when I met my wife, fifty years ago, and it's exactly as it happened. I dream of our marriage, and I can even see my father's tears of pride. It's all there, just as it was. But then I dream of my own death, which I have heard is impossible to do, but you must believe me. I dream of my wife telling me on my deathbed that she loves me, and even though she thinks I can't hear her, I can, and she says she wouldn't have changed anything. It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, and they have and will a thousand times, I awake (53-54).

2. He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. . . . He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all (64).

3. And when she said, Father, I love you, she was neither naive nor dishonest, but the opposite: she was wise and truthful enough to lie. They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things--willingly playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life (114).

etc etc etc. I would quote the entire book if I could.