18. ROCKAWAY
If only novels and books in general were less predictable. Once I’ve grasped an author’s intentions, once I’ve got the gist of the premise, the plot, the characters, the theme, the style — once I pretty much know what I’m reading — I lose all interest. I’m reminded of the opening of Dazai’s No Longer Human, in which the narrator explains how, as a young boy, he’d been entranced by a railway overpass near to his home, how he’d stand at the center of the overpass for hours watching the trains pass to and fro beneath him, believing that the overpass had been built for that purpose, to feed his aesthetic poetic enjoyment. No sooner did he discover that in fact the structure served the prosaic utilitarian function of letting commuters cross the tracks that he lost all interest in
