From: Ben
Category: Other stuff
Date: 25 October 2001
There's a kind of feeling of rising detachment, rising and falling back from the world in a way that makes you feel like you have vertigo, that makes you feel that everything is meaningless as you look down on ants running below. Except that you realise clearly that nothing is meaningless, you see the importance of important things like someone on feeling pain but not in pain, you want desperately to claw back to reality except you know that what you are curently feeling is reality, and what you long to feel is illusion. It is a feeling characterised by desperation, depression and petulance most of all. Do you think that I don't know the world is beautiful, do you think that matters to me? This is a deeply egotistical book, Moravia longs to plunge into eroticism but can't bring himself to do so. The central character is a cipher, animated by instinct, unmotivated, the sophisticate's view of an unsophisticate. Adriana is a prostitute motivated less by money than by sensuality. All the assumptions in this book are troubling. "any man in the world might happen to kill someone and an woman might sell herself for money" Sex, death, birth and love are just further, powerful, animating forces without reason. And you can never tell, really, what will happen to have significance, and what will not.
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