One Step Closer

One step closer to the final destination.

After the discovery Oskar makes about the key, he begins his adventure headed towards finding the lock the key opens and the person it belongs to. And so he starts his journey, by going all over New York finding the Blacks'. Oskar's first stop was Abby Black. She lived in a very nice home, with many images of animals and was an epidemiologist. She was indeed very kind, but knew nothing about the key or about what it could open. The next Black Oskar visited was Abe Black. He forced Oskar to get into his first rollercoaster, and later that day took Oskar back to his home, but again disappointment came, since this Black knew nothing about the key, the lock, or his father. After Abe, Oskar visited Ada Black. Ada was very rich, actually was the 467th richest person in the world, and owned two Picasso paintings. She lived in what Oskar calls "the most amazing apartment he had ever seen." Still, she knew nothing about the key at all. Afterwards, Oskar visited the next Black, who turned out lo live right upstairs from his apartment. He was a very old man, actually about 100 years
old. This Black, who Oskar calls Mr. Black, had lived through almost all history, and had gone through many experiences. Anyway, now he never left his house. Oskar felt pity for the old man and decided to offer him something incredible. Said offer was for him to accompany Oskar in his journey to find the lock the key opens and the person it belongs to, an amazing adventure that will forever change the course of Oskar's life. Later that night Oskar gets in a terrible fight with his mother, in which he states before her, that he would have preferred she died instead of his father. With this his mom walks away, and it takes a great deal of effort for Oskar to try and take back what he said.

While I was reading this book, I encountered a couple of quotes I found interesting and very meaningful. The first one goes like this:

"I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing" (Foer 174).

This is how people nowadays are, with eyes only for money
and materials. 

This quote for me reflects and can connect clearly to the society of nowadays and how people now tend to fill themselves with meaningless, empty things. Think about materialism, it's the same concept. Us, humans try to fill the voids in their lives with materials. We want to buy happiness, but happiness can't be bought. We want to end with our loneliness and our lack of love with materials, but materials don't have emotions, materials can't think, they can't keep us company. Materialism is not equal to happiness, it doesn't express joy and nor does it fill the empty voids of life. We fill our lives with empty things, meaningless things, and we try to replace what we really care about with them. Like the quote states, we miss what we already have. We miss love and family, we crave for happiness and company, without realizing all those things stand right before us, and we have to simply open our eyes to see them. But we are blind, we are blind for real life, and we can only see the endless cycle of materialism we live through today. We now, like the quote states, surround ourselves with things that are missing, with things that aren't what we want, things that try to make us want what we already have, make us get what we don't really need. But who can change this endless cycle of emptiness, only we can change it for ourselves.

The second quote I found was the following:

"... there are so many times when you know you are feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is" (Foer 163).

I really liked this quote, and not because it has a very deep meaning, but because I experience this very often. There are days when I feel something in my stomach, moving around, not allowing me to be in peace with myself, without having a cue n what it is. By having no idea on the why of its existence, there is no way for me to solve it, or end with it. It keeps bugging me, and it doesn't stop. I have, at times, reached the conclusion that it is a simple mixture of emotions I can't control. But at
other times, I don't know what it is that I'm feeling, and I wish it would just stop. Feeling a lot of nothing or everything at the same time, is not very pleasant, since you are in a constant inner struggle between trying to find out what that something is, trying to solve or end with it, or trying to forget and move on. I can connect my everyday life with this quote, and that for me makes a good book. If the reader can connect with the text quite often, the book will be more reader-friendly, it will be much more pleasant to read, and that is what this book is doing with me.

This is what pops right into my head when this occurs to me.

As farther as I continue to read, as interesting the book gets. With discoveries and the rising of new mysteries, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" continues to surprise me and intrigue me. I just want to keep on reading, but not only to find out more about the key, the lock, or its owner, but to uncover all the mysteries Oskar has inside him, everything that is still hidden. I want to find out more about the lives of all the Blacks' he meets and mostly I want to meet the one Black the key is related to.