The only positive thing is that I spent the day reading a novel called “Stoner”. It had magnificent pieces of prose within it. The words so deftly painted a picture of modern life that it is hard to say a harsh word about this book. I posted a couple of the quotes that struck with the most force on Facebook. I share them here.
"He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life was worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him.
In his extreme youth Stoner thought of love is an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he decided it was the heaven of the false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified movement by movement and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and by the heart."
Stoner - John Williams
The book is older. It is available in larger libraries. If you need something one day to fill a few hours pick it up.
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