MOON MOON

I have been wanting to read this book for so long that I think the expectations just kept building and building until the real thing had no chance to catch up to it anymore. Not to say that this book is bad, of course. I think it would be hard to find one person in this tiny planet who would consider this a bad book. I think Stoner is so universally beloved, which is part of the reason why I was so keen to read it and then a bit disappointed. The problem really is that I read it with the expectation that I would have a life-changing realization. I also read it while I was pre-occupied with more mundane and boring matters like work and money. This book is more about the abstract, the inner life. I felt I had not emotional capacity to worry about my inner life.

Nevertheless, Stoner managed to break through that wall. Despite the fog that my head was in, the ending still managed to speak to me. There is so much about Stoner that resonated with me and so much that I envied. The pivotal moment in Stoner's life where he fell in love with literature was a familiar scene to me. Like him, I also took a compulsory class and quickly fell in love with it. However, unlike Stoner, I never had the courage to act on that love. Now I enjoy snippets of philosophy but I think I will never achieve the same level of passion that I had when I first discovered it. Towards the end of Stoner's life he was talking about the things that he couldn't do and the failures that he had in his life. What made the ending sequence so beautiful was the evident lack of regret. Stoner knew he didn't live a 'rich' life but he did live a life that was his own. It was representative of the things that he wanted, even though he couldn't see everything through - not his marriage, not his love affair, not his teaching career. Somehow, he always fell short. There was something so poignant about the last chapter. It wasn't like anything I've ever read bout dying. I think that's also why it was so moving. This is most likely what my life is going to be like. Unremarkable, a failure by all accounts but not a wrong one. It's like the antithesis to the stories about grand lives with some overarching meaning or purpose. There was nothing grand about Stoner's life and there most likely won't be anything grand about your life either. It's a life, nonetheless, and it's yours. This book isn't saying anything as banal as 'life is what you make of it' or some other commonplace phrase. It's not telling you to grab life by the horns otherwise you will not be remembered. It was telling me that sometimes life is like this and that's okay. Sometimes life is a failure to outsiders but to the you who lived it, it was something.

I want to reread this book in the future. I know the only reason I couldn't appreciate it as much as I wanted to is because I was distracted by life. Someday, I will be in a perfect time and place for it.