Lights Out In Wonderland

I mentioned yesterday that I had been reading Babette's Feast by Karen Blixen, and that it felt as though there should be more.

Well, there is a book that took a similar concept - the feast of a lifetime - and ran with it to novel length.

Look at it, my friend: all that has ever been called love of life, is a love of things that won't happen...Our farewell dinner should be as splendid as anything since the fall of Rome. A Feast of Trimalchio. A night of the Satyricon. A limbo that blisters all restraint, a cone of nimbus so high that stars are sucked inside it.

I'm a bit of a fan of DBC (Dirty But Clean) Pierre. He had me at the IKEA scene in Lights Out. There is a level of empathy that, once shared, is never lost.

I particularly liked the following observation:
 

Life is a strange animal, with none of the boundaries we think are there. Situations can turn at any time. And our hunt for assurance makes us easy to manipulate. Commerce makes its fortune selling empty solutions, making us feel we have to reach and reach for safety. And when we can't reach it, because it's not built to be reached, we reach for a drink or a drug to ease the frustration. Of course things will spiral out of control, in fact they're meant to - look how many industries depend on the spiral. But like any dictatorship, even a psychological one like this, people will in time band together against it. People on needless spirals will gather. Reach out and take control.

At the very back of the book is a little addendum beginning:

We will be destroyed
whether we like it or not.

I say let's like it.

A motto to live by, certainly.

Worth wrapping your eyes around if you're still hungry after the feast.