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I finished The Brothers Karamazov.

I'm depressed. Finishing a beautiful book is one of the most difficult things I can imagine doing. You want it to go on and on but it doesn't. I'm still in love with Alyosha. I'm more like Dmitry than I thought. I read Ivan's Nightmare and the Devil with my mouth hanging open in sheer awe at Dostoevsky's brilliance.

So now I'm reading To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. My mom said it was depressing and horrible and made her want to kill herself, but my friend Rachel raved about how sublime it was (and absolutely full of the Oceanic Feeling) so I have to give it a try.

The very first page had this amazing passage-

Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling- all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language...

Does it sound proud and silly to say that reminds me of myself? Or at least, myself when I was six.

And now I conclude this absurdly bookish entry.

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