Natalies' Friday Post

Pgs 80-120

Mrs. Ford leaving Tony the diary was a strange thing to do. I wonder why she had the diary in the first place, and why she would even give it to him. Hopefully these are things that will be resolved by the ending of the novel. I wonder if Veronica actually burnt the diary or not. The one page excerpt from the diary clearly shows how intelligent he was, even towards the end of his life which disproves what many people were saying about people who committed suicide being crazy. The last line from the letter "So for instance, if Tony..." leads Anthony to think and question his own life. He basically sees himself as a boring person, who settled for comfort and what was easiest rather then taking risks. This reminded me back to the beginning of the novel when he spoke about how he wanted his life to mirror Literature and how he wanted to have adventures, and love and tragedy. Not many of these things happened which made me feel sorry for him, but in reality how many of these things happen to "regular" people? Even to extraordinary people I feel like life rarely mirrors literature. I think this may have been why he killed himself, to take control of his own life. Something Anthony had never done. I like the quote "But time... how time firsts grounds us and then confounds us." I really enjoyed this quote and can clearly see how this is true, but at the same time it made me very sad. Maybe it is because I am still a teenager and wish to have adventures and what not, but this probably seems like what actually happens.

Tony goes back to the concept of memories and how they are affected and manipulated by our own minds. I liked the quote "How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? ... that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but- mainly- to ourselves." I think this is something that is very true. Partially because at times we do things that we aren't too proud of, and rather then having to live with that constant guilt in our minds we tell other people only we downplay what we did. We tell so many other people, and ourselves, so many times the downplayed version of what occurred that that ends up being our memory. And years from now that is how we remember it completely.