Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie

Blaise Pascal's Pensées

I finished As I Lay Dying today and it comforted me. It's a stark and bleak novel and it was uncomfortable at times experiencing what's left of this family and all the mistakes they keep making. I had the idea that each event as decribed by the narrators, when pieced together to form a wider perspective, appears locally like a tragedy. However, the overarching narrative doesn't seem to have that form. It's hard to tell who the book is about, in a traditional sense: for an hour I entertained the idea that the character who dies at the beginning is the protagonist. But as disconcerting as the novel was it, having pitied and feared as much as I did over the course of it, the end of the novel was a kind of cessation of stress more than anything else. The relief from terrible emotion was enough to make me appreciate simple reality free of it.

On a less (?) suicidal note, I am teaching myself 'forcing', a technique of mathematical logic that has intimidated me for years. You won't have Landon to kick around anymore, forcing!