You walk to the back isle labeled Philosophy, pull White Nights off the shelf, slide your back down the shelves sprawling your legs out as you sit to read, “It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me. . .For though I have been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. . .I felt afraid of being left alone, and for three whole days I wandered about the town in profound dejection, not knowing what to do with myself. . .They of course do not know me, but I know them. I know them intimately; I have almost made a study of their faces. . .For two evenings I was puzzling my brains to think what amiss in my corner; why I feel so uncomfortable in it. . .” A woman searching for a book beside you steps in-between your legs, Excuse me, I’m just searching for Camus’s The Stranger.

You know when you read something, and it feels as though the words you are reading came from your own thoughts? That happens a lot when you read philosophy, thoughts you thought no one else thought are captured in literature or philosophical novels waiting for you to see you in them.

© Victoria Venturella, MA, Wait a Meta, Existential Dialogues

Photo from film: A Woman is a Woman (1961)

Dostoevsky, White Nights (1848)

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