The Wreck of the Read. chap 3

[Mark Kohut]

As someone has just written about this chapter, Esther
will not let Wyatt be...............................

that is (one of) the extraordinary achievements  of this
chapter, imho. The way Gaddis piles on and builds this
perception--this whole atmosphere of emotional connection
that goes too far, it seems, in Esther--what we might gloss
as her narcissism. 

Gloss attempt: Narcissism, psychologically = all about me, the whole
world as it impacts me, my sensibility. [see that perception in the
Dylan movie, I'm Not There] IF one is so, what one loses is

Reality?."Why do you smoke after?"  
"Reality", says Wyatt. Who is trying to deal with 'reality' outside himself.

Why I liked this so, besides perhaps my own narcissism, is that I see it 
as a situation we all might know--I think I do anyway---in some form. 

Which I have talked about with some friends as the overspilling of (some) 
 emotions.
Two people living together, don't even have to be husband & wife, often start 
having
feelings/thoughts dependant on the other and which therefore start conditioning 
the reality they supposedly share. . Fill in your own examples, if you see it 
this way. 


Related from literature: When Kitty (In Anna K.) has her ardent, youthfully 
hopeful, fantasy-based 

 'being in loveness' with Vronsky rebuffed, Tolstoy knows her feelings cannot 
just easily end. 

He sends her off to live with an older woman friend of her family, a wise, 
energetic, charmingly
charismatic woman who sets Kitty on a schedule of work and activity (to forget, 
of course) but
with whom Tolstoy says she, Kitty, "falls in love".....not physically of course, 
not even erotically 

(except subterreanianly) but just as a way to show where her ardent spirits 
went...........