Who am I kidding?

I can't respond to Hamlet right now. My life is completely different than his now, and I can't escape this moment to remember anything else.

"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, stuck in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

This may ruin some things if you plan to read Catch-22:

EXCERPTS (from near the end of the book):

"Nothing warped seemed bizarre any more in his strange, distorted surroundings. ... The night was raw. ... and Yossarian wanted to smash her too, because she reminded him of ... all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people?"

"The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world..."

"Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret."

And Yossarian sounds exactly like me, like my thoughts, like how I feel about the world.

Why is it that I tend to prefer American authors? Is it the closeness to the language, being able to understand it as it was first written without having to learn an entirely new culture?

I wonder. I wonder just why

I'm alive.