I had moments of really loving this book and really being turned off by overly-poetic (read: nonsensical) prose, changes between first-person/third-person, and the sort of dream-realm (

which I was reallyyyy unhappy to end the book in

). I liked all the reflections on art and writing and making sense of a senseless world amid feeling generally suicidal but wary of that death making not a difference, but this just didn’t land for me. 

Here are some favorable quotes/sentiments, nonetheless: 
“Maybe it’s because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it say until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn’t do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero” 
“But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?”
“His whole life was a conspiracy of other people helping him, other people teaching him this or that. He felt like Hamlet, just moping around waiting for the world to assuage his grief, petulantly soliloquizing and fainting while everyone else fed him bananas and candy bars”
“‘Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled […] Never love? That seems like the big one”