Book Passage of the Week – Everyone is Dead

I read The Moviegoer in 2011. This quote occurs to me from time to time, especially when I’m on Facebook. Could I adjust to life off-the-grid? I think so. A home, a typewriter, a bookshelf. What else do I need? The complexity of a human being. But some people are nothing more than a few emojis and an empty reaction to this month’s fashionable outrage.

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.

It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but–” or “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However–” and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord.