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The gap between sharing a room and sharing an experience.

       What interests me most about Clarissa’s party is the possibility that bringing people together in a lovely enviroment is not the same as making them feel understood. At first, the preparations seem like a strange focus for a novel– why spend so long on flowers and guests when right in front of our eyes, Septimus is struggling with PTSD the war caused him? But placing these experiences beside each other makes the party more complicated than a symbol of wealthy shallowness. Clarissa spends her day arranging an occasion for people to gather and be together, while Septimus’s story exposes how badly people can fail to recognize another person’s suffering. The circumstances are very different, but I read both stories as asking a question about connection.  How close can we actually get to someone whose inner life that we cannot fully see? That question becomes especially uncomfortable when unfortunate news of Septimus’s suicide reaches the party. Clarissa ...
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Thinking Too Damn Much About a Hand Dryer

One of the parts of  The Mezzanine  that I found myself thinking about the most was Howie's discussion of hand dryers. At first, it seemed like another one of those completely unnecessary things that Howie ended up overthinking– which I desperately wanted to skim. A hand dryer is something I would normally use without thinking about it; wash my hands, put them underneath the machine, wait a few seconds, and leave. There really isn't anything interesting about this process. But Howie has a way of taking these tiny, forgettable moments and annoyingly forcing me to actually think about what I am doing. The hand dryer is supposed to be helping me, since I have just washed my hands and obviously want them to be clean and dry, but the more I think about it, the less clean the whole situation starts to feel. The weird thing about a hand dryer is that it does not actually clean anything. It just blows air. This seems obvious, but I had never really thought about it until Howie's at...
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