Eastern European authors

If you know me you know I am obsessed with fiction.  I fell deeply in love with Milan Kundera's writing as a 19 year old living in Hawaii, over my head in a grad school fiction class.  I hate school, but that class changed my life.  I was introduced to Kafka, Kundera, Borges, Calvino, Dostoevsky, and a host of other writers.  I remember sitting on the beach on the north shore of Oahu reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being and being completely blown away.  I turned straight from the last page to the first page and then went out and got everything he had written at the time and read it all within the next year.  I love that feeling of obsession that comes with reading an entire authors canon.  I devoured Vonnegut in a year, David Foster Wallace in two, and Ursula Le Guinn in half.  I am only 1/3 of the way through Delany's canon but I love living in those universes.  Being that into a novel is like having another friend who really understands you and continuously challenges you.  Recently I've been losing my mind over The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch.  The book was written partially in a concentration camp.  Fuck.  It reads more like poetry than prose, and it delves even deeper into the darkness than Infinite Jest.  A notable line, " emerging from darkness, heading toward darkness, sinking into darkness."  The entire book reeks of death.  White Noise by Delilo also reeks of death, but it's in a very different way.  Delilo has it dripping from the words, while Broch forces you into the darkness, into nothingness, and forces you to realize you came from the darkness, live in the darkness, and heading toward the darkness.  However, there is light, but not in the hope bullshitty kind of way.  The light lies in accepting timelessness, which to me cuts to the heart of anti-civilization ideas.  I run in circles now where anti-civilization can be seen as leftist, although I tend to disagree with that, but the larger point is, I am in a much different place. 

    My core group now is nihilists, anti-social anti-political @'s.  I find my views align with them more than anyone I've ever been friends with.  There is a general misconception that we are fucked up or don't care.  My response:  yes we are fucked up, and yes we care.  However, we refuse to live in a lie.  We refuse to believe or put hope in revolution or organizing or leftism, which is pretty easy not to do because it has a long history of failure.  If there is an answer, or a way out, or a way to change this shitty fucking situation, it definitely lies elsewhere.  Enter nihilism:  a freeing of myself to explore all ideas and become untethered from my past of liberalism and then leftism.  I am free now to think as I please, to play with ideas, to hold nothing sacred.  I am free to accept myself.  Something special is going on, and I refuse not to appreciate it. 

Maybe it coincides with this, but I am handling conflict in a much different way now.  I don't feel as paralyzed by the small dramas with friends and strangers.  I feel that I can deal with things, and when I make mistakes I don't go into cycles of self loathing.  I have continued not to date, and I find myself feeling more autonomous than ever.  It would be hard to date now anyways, since a large part of me is still in love with her, so in some ways it makes it easier to be alone, even though I wish I was cuddling with her or kissing her.  I would like to meet someone new that I like enough to kiss and wanna stay up all night with...but I am happy to have friends I stay up all day and night talking to.  Kissing will come eventually, but sometimes it is hard to feel like I won't always be a little sad if it's not here I am kissing.  Even though I am grieving her loss still, I am enjoying my autonomy and the fact that I am less anxious every day, since I am no longer worried that the person I am trying to be closest to is lying to me and not as interested in the closeness that I was looking for.  It is fucking sad, plain and simple, there is no way around that.  However, I must live.  Death is guaranteed and will come eventually, so now I choose to live.  I may one day have my life taken from me, but now it is mine and I will choose to live.  I will keep learning bright eyes and t swift songs on guitar, I will continue reading ridiculous novelists like Broch, Musil, and Delany, and I will fight to keep the fierce autonomy I currently have.  I will not submit to another person by choice ever again.  Any relationship I enter, I will maintain my autonomy, my respect for myself, and meet as a union of egos, people who meet up out of strength and not weakness.  I will write, I will read, I will create, I will burn, and I will live in the fire, not for the fire.