Final Post

            I thought that the end of the book was really rushed and didn’t make that much sense. I don’t understand how Tony couldn’t differentiate Mary and Veronica, because shouldn’t Mary logically be a lot younger than Veronica? I understand that all of the emails and discourse exchanged between Tony and Veronica (or Mary?) at the end of the book were supposed to be clues for Tony to stay away form Veronica (or Mary?) I don’t think this book makes any sense whatsoever.

            I really want to like this book but I was left confused and unsatisfied. Tony was annoyingly self-pitying and way too melodramatic. If I were him, then I really wouldn’t like myself either. He spends too much time thinking about his relationships with other people and using them to get ahead with his desires and wishes. Also, he has a very low self-esteem that brings him to all of this trouble. There were a lot of ideas in this story, some of which I really like but they were all cramped together and disorganized so I felt like the book was unsolved when it ended. 

            I think that this book exaggerates the nonsense and futility of philosophy in reality. Sure we can hypothesize, predict, determine trends, and waste time fixating on the past, present, and future but there really is no progress that evolves from this matter. I think this led to Tony’s unsatisfying grandparenthood. A couple of parts that I like include the ideas that we invent pasts for others around us to infer their characters, “our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life”, and the effect of time on self-reflection. I think everyone pursues to understand their surroundings and make up excuses or ideas that make them more comfortable. But, since we solely determine these comforts ourselves, we become more isolated than the other people around us and from the truth. Humans have the ability to make up whatever they believe in, regardless of whether it is good for them or not.

            I don’t like this book because Tony is pretentious throughout the entire book and expects too much from other people and himself. He is really pessimistic about life and it causes him to live a miserable life. The idea that we all have responsibilities over our effects on ourselves and other people makes sense because we live in a world where we constantly collaborate and interact with other people and explore these relationships.