Jake as Septimus

I didn't believe that a book could be more sorrowful than Mrs. Dalloway until I read The Sun Also Rises. God, the latter was just like a punch to the gut. Jake Barnes, an incredibly normal and respectable guy, is so very much like Septimus Smith. There is something fundamentally lacking about Jake and this wound, physical and physiological, prevents him from seeking the love that he so obviously desires. And yet everywhere, he is bombarded with other people in love. Walking in the street, he notices "a man and a girl... walking with their arms around each other (83)." He silently criticizes the careless matrimonial behavior of Robert Cohn, and derides the crowd of chaps that follow Brett around who are so thoughtless with their gift to procreate life. 

Septimus too suffered from his inability to feel particularly because everyone around him showered him with feelings. To realize that you lack something so essentially ingrained in everyone else is a frightening realization. It is an unbelievably lonely feeling. To escape it, Septimus commits suicide and Jake exhibits bitter behavior. What Jake will do though remains to be seen.

What if!

Had Clarissa chosen Peter over Richard, her life would have been miserable. Where Richard can provide her with comfort, stability, and a room of her own, Peter would have consumed her life, ate up her vitality and stamped out her virtues. Peter, always toying with his knife, appears to me to be irregular and downright fanciful; he loves Clarissa, to be sure, but his love for her is hurting her. "Are you happy?" he had asked of her, but what kind of question is that to address to a married woman with a grown daughter and thriving household? He later stalks a young woman (a prostitute?) through the streets for the fun of it, and he enjoys an affair with Daisy, another married woman. The way he longs after Clarissa is as if she belongs to him and Richard has stolen her away; his love for her is selfish, almost despicable.

Many would sympathize with Peter's passionate, romantic soul, but his overwhelming emotions would have suffocated Clarissa who, like Woolf herself, enjoyed life at a distance. Where Richard feels lucky to have Clarissa, Peter takes great glee at picking apart her faults. Although there was a period in her life when Clarissa was undeniably radical, even Peter is forced to observe that she would likely marry Richard because of her conventional core. For someone with her delicate sensibilities and empathy, a marriage with the wild and untamable Peter would have been stifling. Even if we pretend that it was Clarissa's refusal of Peter's marriage proposal which was the catastrophic event that altered him forever, his dramatic removal to India seems to me rather histrionic. This act belies an overly dramatic personality that is unchangeably Peter's.

(nichols)On Baker

"Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes." 

Marcus Aurelius, short for Marcus Aurelius Annius Catilius Severus Antoninus Augustus with a Caesar thrown in somewhere given that he was a Roman emperor, was first and foremost a Stoic philosopher, which, and please forgive my crude summary, meant that he repressed most if not all emotions to achieve intellectual perfection; in the modern era, we would have called him antisocial. Given this background, one can almost forgive Aurelius's depressing account of life. Spending most of your impressive life purposefully shunning personal enjoyment and sensory pleasures would give anyone the impression that life is nothing more than a bore.

Howie on the other hand is damn cheerful that it hurts to pick up The Mezzanine on a gloomy day. His enthusiasm for everything that crosses his path and his remarkable ability to convey that to the reader make me equally nauseous and envious. Here is a guy with a curiosity that didn't just kill the cat - it suffocated whales - and life seems to shimmer off of him as naturally as breathing. The fact that he's even in close proximity with a book authored by Stoic should be labeled as a paradox; there is a fundamental, universal, and atomical difference between him and Aurelius a galaxy wide and a black hole deep.

In fact, The Mezzanine seems like a complete refutation of Meditations. Even on a surface level, the contrast between the titles is almost comical: whereas "meditations" ring out with austereness and grandeur, there is something light and vivacious about "mezzanine." Where Aurelius counsels against indulging in sensory affections, Howie is not afraid to pause and examine every ordinary object, always managing to marvel over something worthwhile hidden in the simplicity. Yet although Baker never advises anyone to follow Howie's mode of living, no one can help but smile at the happiness his character exudes. Look, Baker seems to say, I took a lunch hour that occurred years ago and made a sort-of-novel out of it! Don't praise me, he would protest, try it yourself! Had Aurelius ever picked up The Mezzanine, there is no doubt on my mind that he would have had it banned and its author burned.