Which I just want to document because it expresses this idea I've been thinking about for a while, because I read The Name of the Rose over Christmas and am now intermittently reading a few pages of Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, this idea that we can't express our emotions, which belong wholly to ourselves, without alluding to existing texts and quotes because we're so saturated by other people's thoughts. I was going to write a short story about that, about a girl who's grown up reading all these really cool things about life and love and who then expects her own life to be as exciting and interesting, but it obviously isn't. She gets into a relationship when she's 17, a year after she feels she's supposed to, and she's constantly analysing it and herself and she doesn't really know the difference between what she wants and what she thinks she should have. She's supposed to break up with him after a year but then she gets pregnant and stays with him. I haven't started writing it, and probably never will, I just came up with it in an attempt to squeeze some fiction out of myself. Not only do all texts speak of other and previous texts but we also want our lives to be a text, which it obviously can't be. It also relates to young-girl stuff, like the fact that no matter what I'm doing at all times there's a second part of my mind that constantly visualises how I look in the third person, how other people (specifically men, who have the power to judge and compare in this utterly entitled and inhumane way - something that I also touched upon when I talked about Franzen's description of women in Purity) see me. My self-consciousness consumes everything I do.
Why must we see everything second-hand?
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