The Reader

In a vain attempt at distracting myself from.. well.. life and all it's complexities, I bought the book "The Reader" from Target the other day. I don't reccomend it. I'm really only finishing it because I'm one of those people who HAS to finish a book even if it totally sucks and takes me months to get through. At any rate, the author does have great insights about certain things. The following is an excerpt that has stuck with me and I can't get out of my head:

"Why does it make me so sad when I think back to that time? Is it yearning for past happines- for I was happy in the weeks that followed... we loved as if nothing else in the world mattered. Is it the knowledge of what came later, and that what came out afterwards had been there all along? Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths... but we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?

But there was so much energy in me, such belief that one day I'd be attractive and clever... such anticipation when I met new people and new situations. Is that what makes me sad? The eagneress and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill? Sometimes I see the same eagerness and belief in the faces of children and teenagers and the sight brings back the same sadness I feel in remembering myself. Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?"