Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Man, this book was good. One of the best I've read, probably. I'm really glad I got back into reading because books like this exist and they are moving and beautiful and make me cry.
The book is often about video games--well, sort of--and what's perhaps ironic about this is that it clearly displays what books are capable of that video games largely have yet to achieve. I don't mean to demean video games when I say this, I'm avid gamer, but this book moves me and literally made me pause several times because it was so moving and difficult. Zevin's description of a minor character's suicide was so intense, I put the book down, paused for a minute and then went to do something else. When I read the flashback of Sam's mom dying, I had to take a break again. I did not return to the book for two to three days. Every time I thought about it, I remembered what I'd last read and was like "am I ready to keep going?"
I very literally just finished this book in the last half hour or writing this and so I will come back to this post after a little bit of distance, but I was so moved that I had to write about it right away. Please read this book.
For your edification, two quotes from this book that I will ponder for a bit and which struck me in one way or another:
[Sam] wasn’t sure he would have liked sex, even if everything on his body had been in perfect working order. Though there was some truth to what the boy had said. Sam did not believe his body could feel anything but pain, and so he did not desire pleasure in the same way that other people seemed to. Sam was happiest when his body was feeling nothing. He was happiest when he did not have to think about his body–when he could forget that he had a body at all. (Zevin 194)
There's a lot to think about here, for me. I've written previously about my relationship to my body and the concept of embodiment, to some extent. I should revisit that post and think about it again in this context. I rarely thought of myself in a bodily sense until the last few years. As I've gotten older, I experience more aches and pains (whoa, unique experience /j) and these kind of remind me of the presence of my body. Idk, it's something I spend a lot of time considering and Descartes' Mind-body problem.
"I love you too, Grandpa." For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn't you tell someone you loved them? One you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. why not? Of course, you god damn did. (Zevin 384)
ETA: It's been a few months since I finished this book and wrote this blog post and man, these quotes still hit. I didn't write about it, but that second one really gets me. I don't think when I was younger I thought too much about the people I loved and how much I loved them--that probably sounds ruder than I mean it--I was a kind of thoughtless child for much of my youth and I loved people, but not until I was a teenager did I start to really think of it. Anyways, fast-forward to now when I think, frequently, about my friends and how much I love them. I sometimes cry thinking about my friends because they mean so much to me and they are my world. There is so much, especially now, that fucking sucks. But I have my friends; I love them and they love me and sometimes, that's enough.