“studies briefly with a Buddhist guru, whose advice is to “[e]xamine every thought, desire, sensation until you fully understand its source. Expect nothing from the world. Then you will naturally wake up to your true state.””
“reading Elsie’s confessions is like listening to a friend who has made some questionable choices but reflects with intelligence and emotional integrity upon them.”
“Tennant-Moore seems to be on a welcome and worthy mission to offer a corrective to the proliferating accounts of young male bodies that mark the novels of “all the sad young literary men,” pace Keith Gessen.”
“At one point, Elsie watches a local custom and moves from pleasure — “How delightful it is to be inside this scene to which I will never belong, which asks nothing of me except to observe a way of living that has nothing to do with what I’ve learned about living so far” — to something more troubling:
Until I become aware of my delight, and another, stronger part of my brain steals the simple enjoyment from me, characterizing the scene as an exotic spectacle worthy of noting, to be used later as a way to prove something about myself — that I’m interesting, brave, unusual. I am a parasite of my own experience.”
“This scene is a strong moment of insight, capturing the experience that many young, over-educated, well-intentioned, liberal first-world travelers have surely had when first facing the “exotic” and the “other.””