[On Negative Book Reviews] Just another way of being.

[All this week, WWAATD contributors wax poetic, lyrical and philosophical on the pitfalls, perils, and passions of the negative book review.—Ed.]

As I think about everything I do externally, it feels like it’s all in service of connection. Whether for validation, affection, confirmation — the heart wants to feel another. To know that I am not alone. But that’s just too simple, because to not be alone all I’d have to do would be to join one other person, right? But my heart is not content with just any other, my heart wants specifically and so certain books attract certain looks.

I wrote a book review in which I said one negative thing about a generally beloved book and its author, and ever since I did I have wished I could take it back. But you can’t take back the internet, and the reason — second after ‘pursuit of the writing high’ — that I make myself write reviews and little things for WWAATD, is to learn to fathom my opinions so that I can continue to write. This doesn’t mean stand by them, more like let them exist and then fall.

Because it’s really hard for me to express them, opinions, and really hard for me to know that you might disagree with them, my opinions. It’s really hard to know that they might be the best opinions in a given context, but that contexts change and so opinions change, emotions intercept logic and egos blur perception and all we are is a collection of skewed memories. Often I look back and realize just how stupid I have been, how dull my thinking, how inconsiderate of everything, and my face wants to crawl so deeply into my belly button that I cease to exist. This needs to stop.

Because we can never know anything, try as we do. A book may be good or it may be bad or it may be fruitflies buzzing round a rotten apple. All of this, all of this living, this garnering of experience, the ‘search for knowledge’ so intrinsic to humanity as to be our downfall is fruitless. I say fruitless because we all just die in the end. If one thing is just the same as another (‘a thing that exists’), then what is the point of comparison? This is time-passing. Book reviews and county fairs and b-boy dance competitions and summer holidays pass the time. Christmas fills the empty space in the dead of winter.

Is this a pessimistic, sorry view? Doesn’t matter. It will change tomorrow or I’ll feel differently, or a comment will make me think ten million thoughts I hadn’t thought before. This ever changing is exhausting yet somehow necessary. I wish I believed it is growth, but growth implies like, linearity or expansion. We cannot know what we are growing toward if anything, and that is the crux of everything.