Excerpt from "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn.
I bloody typed the whole thing out, I liked it so much.
Story of our lives. (This excerpt, definitely not the book!)
"For several years I had been bored. Not a whining,
restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense,
blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered
ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word
derivative as a criticism itself is derivative). We were the first human beings
who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the
world dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building.
Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I
can't recall a single amazing thing I've seen firsthand that I didn't
immediately reference to a movie or a TV show. A fucking commerical. You know
the awful singsong of the blase: Seeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the
worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The
secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is
keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way
reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point,
those of us who are most of us, who grew up with TV and movies, and now the
Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; if a loved one dies, we
know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the
fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared
script.
It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a
real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected
from an endless automat of characters.
And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing
as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.
It had gotten to a point where it seemed like nothing matters,
because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.
I would have done anything to feel real again."
