Literature

There's something bearing down on me. There is a great suffocating oppression that thickens the air and clots my throat and weighs down my eyelids and renders my mucous membranes arid.

It is very unpleasant. My eyes are continually shrink-wrapped and my tongue is thick and I cannot help but feel that I am being oppressed by Literature and Want. Literature because it is pregnant with decades of dust and scholarship and Want because I want more than anything to be the repository of all of this and I feel limitations being set...concepts that I can grasp but cannot conceive. The pages are all so invariably rich that I want to vomit my displeasure and suck down something simple and graceless and candied, like Harry Potter.

Even Mark Twain, the silly bastard, writes such insanely elegant mockery that he doesn't at all feel out of place with Nabokov or Tolstoi.

it is extraordinarily depressing to be told that Nabokov's work is so layered that no one in the class (but I feel the statement very personally) can hope to grasp all of his complexities and games. I cannot, apparently, even pronounce his name correctly.

I like the things he writes. I like them a lot. It is just so discouraging to think that there are many other people who have read his work and are reading his work and understand it and appreciate it much more than I do. It is crushing to think that there are more sophisticated loves than mine.