stranger on the bus

in tenth grade i had to read the stranger by camus. i would read chopin's the awakening the following year. at the time i hated them both. i've talked about the awwakening before (how the first time i read it i thought it was lame because she just gave up, how i read it again off the bookshelf at a beach house on the outer banks and finally got it).

the stranger didn't reach me in high school, not in the way it has this time. i've been reading it on the bus ride to and from work. i finished it on the way home thursday, and found myself welling up during that dramatic final scene between meursault and the priest. perhaps it seems more relevant given the type of work i'm doing this summer. i remember the first time not understanding what drove meursault, a guy who seemed pretty normal to me, to do what he did. i remember saying really dumb conclusory shit about it in class (WHAT? the SUN was in his EYES so he KILLED someone?!?).

i have always had a problem with what i used to deem "unsatisfying endings." you know the type, where nobody wins, or where what seems to be the central conflict of the novel is never resolved. i think part of this for me anyway was that i had misidentified what the central conflict in fact was. whereas before i was terminally bothered by (and probably made asinine comments in class about) the fact that the book ends abruptly before we find out meursault's fate, i now realize that it doesn't matter. that's not the point. just like how chopin's heroine's (god i would have balked at calling her that in high school) final act was more a fierce act of individualistic defiance than a mere acquiescence to societal and familial pressures.

i never know how to wrap these thing up, so i'll just send a big "FUCK YOU" to the house of represeentatives for trying to put my man out of a job. bastards.