Near the conclusion of The Mezzanine, with twenty minutes "left for reading" at the end of his lunch hour, Howie finally opens up the Penguin paperback he's been carrying around and tries to read it. His mood is good: he has found replacement shoelaces at CVS, and he is enjoying a healthy milk-and-cookie lunch in the near-blinding sunlight on a bench outside the office building where he works: "It was a perfect day for fifteen minutes of reading." But when he finds his place "on the brilliant page" and starts to read, he doesn't get very far. Aurelius, in his Meditations, writes: "Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes" (120). Howie reacts strongly: "Wrong, wrong, wrong! I thought. Destructive and unhelpful and misguided and completely untrue!--but harmless, even agreeably sobering, to a man sitting on a green bench on a herringbone-patterned brick plaza near fifteen healthy, regularly spaced trees. . . . I could absorb any brutal stoicism anyone dished out! Instead of continuing, however, I took another bite of cookie and mouthful of milk" (120). He apparently never opens the book again, and the cash-machine receipt serving as a bookmark has remained in place "until quite recently" (124).
Why does this passage upset Howie so much? Why does he react so strongly to this "sobering" and "brutal stoicism"? What does his reaction have to do with his own book, which we have been reading?
Take 5 minutes now to contemplate this passage and Howie's reaction to it in your Notebook.
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