Being nosy is, in fact, advantageous.
There seems to be not much of a point, or perhaps the point is that the point is not the point.
It's like the whole intellectual coating of the past midcentury is sloughing off at once, the last scarred remnants of a flayed skin.
If you can't be rooted to the land, you might as well be rooted to each other.
His speech thrills with all the pleasures of the horror tale.
Would you still love me if I had a brass nose? What if I were intractable? What if I were as old as the Sibyll? Beauty isn’t everything. I cannot recall the face of Bach.
These are games where understanding of the world—both its fiction and mechanical form—are, ultimately, the point. And importantly, they’re treated by developers with near equal weight, internally consistent. You don’t “beat” these games.
I wonder why I am up at such a bleak hour of the morning to watch two men hurt each other.
Why is pain so hard to describe? Of course, there’s the obvious issue: it monopolizes any brain space that might have been used to cultivate apt metaphors and precise descriptions. But even Greenwell’s well-wrought sentences—more vivid than most—leave the sensation out of reach.
If the Stalinist party line was Proletarian Realism, we could perhaps call The Girl a Proletarian Impressionism: not approaching anything like full abstraction, and yet focused considerably more on the sense of a given reality than perfect fidelity to the likeness you'd like it to have.
The end of style, when it ends, is a post on a dejected, impassable frontier. It is the beginning of something wider and colder, and it will have no name.