20th Century Sarah

My first thought about Jake et Gang was, What a great care-free life! All they seemed to do was eating great meals and going out for a drink or dance. Jake and others, despite their flaws, seemed to be harmless, and I enjoyed their antics and banter as I loved their ability to never take anything too seriously. However, I began to despise them as I witnessed how they, the so-called friends, aggravated and brought out the worst in each other. I felt disgusted when in Spain Jake started to purposefully make fun and provoke Cohen, punishing him for his infatuation with Brett. Jake no longer was the pitiful scarred lovesick man but a bully intent on pushing his enemy into mental misery. I extremely disliked this powerplay and the intentional harm Jake inflicted on Cohen. I hated the drama and the fake friendships.   Rather than having honest moments, the characters always put a facade of civility and pretend they are getting along when everything is going to hell. The chara...

Similar to the white background trick in The Mezzanine, Woolf formulates her thesis for Ms. Dalloway in my favorite passage: Clarissa has theory in those days – they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the us going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, wit...