78-81 in Moods

79-80

One of the cliches of love stories--either fictional ones or real ones--is that couples are "meant to be," that everyone is destined to be w/ some other perfect person, that a couple's love is "written in the stars." However, Hoffmann challenges that assumption w/ his 3 objections: The messages are "written on infinite paper" (i.e. they're too complex for us to understand or ever finish reading), they're silent (they're not speaking to us), and they're very old (long before humans ever existed).

And yet at the end of this section, he seems to take it all back, to suggest that the shining of the stars is like the shining of cans of food, that the cashiers who sell that food are made of the same stuff as the stars, that we're all one whether we've found the love of our lives, whether we've found someone else, or whether we live alone in a room-and-a-half.

78

I love the moments in the book that tie Hoffmann to his book, as in the way this section opens, "Yesterday we read..." We really imagine Hoffmann in the act of writing his book, taking off some time to read the paper w/ his coffee and so on. We imagine him reading this article and being inspired to add it to the book whether that's what happened or not. He seems to be arguing in this section that cutting your foot might not be the worst thing. That you could maybe marry the wrong person, someone who wouldn't make you happy. He seems to be saying that lawsuits sully what should be a poetic or mystical or spiritual experience and that maybe if you start a lawsuit on your wedding day you'll be doomed to be partnered w/ someone who will scowl for 40 years.