Garp.
I have been introduced to John Irving’s works a bit late in life: I had developed a certain resistance to easier impressionability, or I would have liked to think so. In many ways I am self-contradictory, and in more levels my recognition of this thrives. Upon reading The World According to Garp I was hit with another level of how I am self-contradictory, and I write, more or less, from the first lines, with a consistent performative contradiction, as I do now. The realization hit the way only a hindsight hits: thus I am somehow an impossible person, for all my realizations hit with the element of memory. It is as if I am doomed over and over to say “I already know this, but it is just now that I know that I know this this consciously.” My memory will be my undoing, perhaps. Or my infuriating stubbornness, which can sometimes be the same thing. Perhaps I have developed a resistance to impressionability so much that when I do learn, I do so more by a bastardized anachr