Reading About Things That I Have (Never) Thought

My french lit class this semester has been in sharp contrast to my summer reading. Over the summer, I read adventure stories. On the Road, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Bonfire of the Vanities... adventures. And novels about heroin: Trainspotting, Junkie, a little bit of Requiem for a Dream before the library demanded it back. I've taken drugs, I've gone on adventures, but the pleasure in reading about other people's experiences with these things lay in the differences of their approach. I do not recall any point in On the Road when I thought "of course! I would have done the same thing!" or a part of EKAAT where I would have felt the same way as Tom Wolfe without his deep involvement in the local zeitgeist. Bonfire of the Vanities was even more difficult, but that's to be expected since the master status of all of the characters is ass-hat.
And the books about drugs... they were like fairy tails. People who felt so very much and so very little at the same time. People who looked for absolute simplicity because the smallest twist was a knot in their stomach. A lifestyle that rejected all of the pressures I felt. Foreign in the extreme.
And now this french literature: Le Pere Goriot by Balzac, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, Du Cote de Chez Swann by Proust, and now La Nausee by Sartre. It's so close to me. I've lived and thought it all before. Maybe not in so many words, but sometimes in many more words. In pictures and hours of meditation and so many places and feelings. Before our first discussion on Le Pere Goriot I laughed with my friends that they thought all of the characters were silly and unrelate-able. My problem was that I identified with them too much to see the story. Proust, I was reading at 10 pages an hour. If I was lucky, I was absorbed in his ruminations. If I slipped though, I read the book as poetry, looking for rhymes and rhythms and getting lost in the SOUNDS so thoroughly connected that when the syllable came along that concluded the phrase my heart leaped with gratification. There it was, what I had been waiting for, handed to me. And now Sartre. He writes about adventure... And about loneliness, about how the perfect memories of places you've been a thousand times and are totally familiar fade to nothing. How when you tell a story it's like you remove yourself and all of the honesty from the situation...
There's so much.
And I'm so tired. The physics problem sets have been deadly, of late. Hardly sleeping. Mostly reading.
Don't even get me started on the political sociology we've been studying.
David Griffiths gave a lecture about the Higgs Mechanism today. Barely understood any of it, loved all of it.
I spin fans so much that even before I start each day my arms are sore. At the end of Looking For Love But Not So Sure by Pretty Lights I spin as fast as I can in the horizontal plane above my head and under my arms, sometimes the fans follow each other and sometimes they stay on one side of my body and alternate up-down-up-falldrop.
I'm consumed.