u/mysourpomegranate

I’ll explain what I mean. A few years ago, I started hanging out with a group of friends that were extremely alluring and unique, and I was very much an outsider. Although they were beautiful and being around them was always memorable and poetic, most of them kind of sucked as people.

Nobody was killed, but one guy in particular was openly and regularly cheating on his girlfriend with numerous women, and it got treated like a joke because nobody really liked her. I found myself thinking a lot about Richard in this time because I felt compelled to tell the girlfriend and also to make my exit, but I also stuck around for longer than I should have because I really badly wanted to be a character in the story.

Obviously staying quiet about cheating and staying quiet about a murder are different things, but after I did eventually make my exit, I always thought of myself as "Papenized” and found that I too had fallen captive to the morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

This tendency in myself is probably why I like the book so much, or maybe the book bred that quality within me, either way, let’s make papenized happen