04-26-25 - journey to the end of the night:

there was no running but i did finish some books, Future Wars and Journey to the End of the Night.

the former felt like a compilation of okay Wired articles, not very technical and pretty accessible in turn. i don't think i'll return to it, but, if you're lacking magazine-esque reading material, perhaps look here.

the latter took a bit more out of me. the early WWI portion reminds of All Quiet on the Western Front with much gore and violence, the differentiating factor being Journey's sardonic, mean voice, which continues long after we have left the front lines. Céline's nastiness and constant gloom made me put the book down on numerous occasions because often it felt personally relevant, for example:

One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things you care about, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort . . . You're good and sick of hearing yourself talk . . . you abridge . . . You give up . . . For thirty years you've been talking . . . You don't care about being right anymore. You even lose your desire to keep hold of the small place you'd reserved yourself among the pleasures of life . . . You're fed up . . . From that time on you're content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere. To rekindle your interest, you'd have to think up some new grimaces to put on in the presence of others . . . But you no longer have the strength to renew your repertory. You stammer. Sure, you still look for excuses for hanging around with the boys, but death is there too, stinking, right beside you, it's there the whole time, less mysterious than a game of poker. The only thing you continue to value is petty regrets, like not finding time to run to Bois-Colombes to see your uncle while he was still alive, the one whose little song died forever one afternoon in February. That horrible little regret is all we have left of life, we've vomited up the rest along the way, with a good deal of effort and misery. We're nothing now but an old lamppost with memories on a street where hardly anyone passes anymore (395).

the connections folks have drawn between Céline and subsequent drifter-writer types like Henry Miller or the Beats are apt, but it's Céline's perpetual mix of depression and hate that sets him apart. like Miller, sex is had. like Kerouac, there's imbibing and travel. unlike them and similar others, though, there's little redemption; everything sucks essentially at all times until death.

the book's pessimism got to me sometimes, gelling a bit too well with my own not so nice daily reflections - commuting, at the office, observing city life, and so on. per regular trifles, it's comforting to passively deem someone an ass or react to some awful episode from current events with a knowing shrug. as a constant way of seeing things, however, i'd imagine that this perspective becomes oppressive. given that this seems to have been Céline's worldview, it's probably not shocking that he wound up a fascist and antisemite.

anyhow, Journey doesn't reach the exact conclusions that its author did. it's a sad, sometimes funny, sometimes boring, but ultimately interesting novel. i don't think it leaves me wanting to go read Death on Credit any time soon despite Neve Campbell's recommending it in Wild Things.

i'm much too busy with other books. plus, i'm eight hours into Mother 3 and there's no going back now.