Sultanas

Over the course of the afternoon I have:
1. finished Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and been heartbroken
2. fussed about my interview tomorrow and checked out how to go there
3. missed a certain someone (I'm terribly predictable, I know)
4. read a few chapters of Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club
5. eaten an overly sweet brownie
6. drunk a lot of water
7. felt lonely
8. sorted out my NUS applications after a series of complicated events
9. read another few chapters of The Rotters' Club
10. been very impressed by Coe
11. wondered amorphously about my future plans
12. missed Z again

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Steinbeck was very powerful. It was so little (only a 100-page-long little book) but so much at the same time, the end hitting me like a sack of bricks (I keep using this analogy. I need more imagination) and leaving me pooled in so much sadness, disillusion, the tragedy of the forgotten. I've East of Eden waiting for me but I think I shouldn't touch it till later on, when I'm done with my other borrowed books, and perhaps when I'm in a not-so-fragile emotional state.

As for Coe, I was impressed ever since What A Carve Up! but The Rotters' Club really strikes me as well, maybe because it encapsulates so much of the madness, the drunken joy and pains of growing up that I've been thinking about recently. He has a way of writing that is absolutely gripping on a surface read and if one digs deeper, there is so much of the essence of being - certain states of life, like youth - that he captures in those glorious passages of his. Here, for example:

"…He was no more persuaded by the things his parents told him, or the teachers at school. It was the world, the world itself that was beyond his reach, this whole absurdly vast, complex, random, measureless construct, this never-ending ebb and flow of human relations, political relations, cultures, histories… How could anyone hope to master such things? It was not like music. Music always made sense. The music he heard that night was lucid, knowable, full of intelligence and humour, wistfulness and energy and hope. He would never understand the world, but he would always love this music. He listened to this music, with God by his side, and knew that he had found a home."
- The Rotters' Club

This paragraph jumped out at me from the end of Chapter 9 and I think I know why, but I don't know what to do with what I know and feel. I'm just here sitting saturated in a deluge of emotion (that isn't all entirely melancholy, or nostalgia, or overwhelmingly negative) and I suppose it would be called "wallowing", but I don't quite know what else to do.