The Counterlife is good to the last 'drop of theatrical existence!'

Sunday, cigarette #2
Bedroom, out the window, 9:25am
THUMBING THROUGH: The Counterlife, Philip Roth

I asked you, with excessive impatience, if your identity was to be formed by the terrifying power of an imagination richer with reality than your own, and should have known the answer myself. How else does it happen?

Richard Klein talks about the "conflicting nature" of cigarettes: "They both raise the pulse and lower it, they calm as well as excite, they are the occasion for reverie and a tool of concentration, they are superficial and profound, soldier and Gypsy, hateful and delicious. Cigarettes are a cruel, beautiful mistress; they are also a loyal companion." This is how I feel about counterlives.

Becoming a personality rather than simply a person takes a lot of printing the legend, otherwise known as lying. Living novelisitically is paradoxical in the way that cigarettes are: by eliminating nuances for the sake of adhering to your archetype, your character becomes more vivid; by dishonestly fixing the storyline of of your life, the plot becomes more plausible.

Professor Senioressayadvisor tried to explain what he meant when he said in reference to Oscar Wilde that some people live life "romantically." Nothing to do with eros, he said, and not an insult. "Oh, I get it." I said. "Romantically as in cinematically." It's some kind of translation to get from Philip Roth to Alfred Hitchcock by way of Oscar Wilde, but that's the English department for you.