The psychological immune system compromised by deliberations in existentialism

It’s like this: You buy a sweater and the store honours a return policy as long as you have the receipt. You keep thinking if the sweater was a good buy and you do that for the next 29 days because of the existence of an option to return the good within 30 days of purchase. You expend much consternation. However, if that policy didn’t exist, or if you had lost the receipt from the first day, you would have saved yourself from the quandary. You would not have compromised your psychological immune system.

Carolyn is back in Singapore. We have not met or talked for three years. I think we were both glad that it was like before. After dinner she came to my place and I think we would have gone on and on if I do not have to go to work the next day.

It could only be with Carol that topics such as the psychological immune system and their risks would be discussed. I missed those conversations.

Carol is my source of good reading titles. Although not all that she likes would be my favourites. We do have different genre preferences.

We met at the book store in Siglap Centre and went through the shelves.

She pointed out three books I should add to my reading list. The first was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. She is the third person who has asked me to read this book (Aun and Franco before this) so I guess I would, in time. It’s just that the title sounds so…saaaaad.

The second book is The Inheritance of Loss.

Is that a sad book?
I don’t know cos I have not read it but Ingo did and he said it was good.

The author, Kiran Desai, is the latest Man Booker Prize winner (they usually are pretty good) and has luminous literary lineage. I’m envious, so she goes into KIV (sour grape).

The third book is The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. (The fiction by Chavelier was derived from her own imagination from Johannes Vermeer’s mysterious painting, now exhibited in The Hague)

Would reading that make me happy?
Happy-ish?

I Googled the title and realize that I have watched the movie before. It was a good movie but Carol lied. She married the butcher’s son. The girl with the pearl earring, that is.

Ok, ok, maybe that is a good ending. She married “up” and her family will not be short of meat. Although, she would smell bovine blood all days of her life in her husband’s caress (I did not think this up, the movie highlighted that).

You can probably tell by now; I am making up for literary paucity over the past four years.

p/s. Kevyn just recommended me Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
pp/s. I found excitement again!!