"I deleted all the games from my computer. I spent days trawling the Internet. I started slowly"
About this Quote
The first sentence is an act of self-exorcism: not just removing “games,” but renouncing a private circuitry of pleasure, compulsion, and time-loss. “Deleted” has the clean finality of a modern moral decision, the kind we frame as a reset button. Then the quote swerves. The replacement behavior is not rest or discipline but another rabbit hole: “I spent days trawling the Internet.” Garden’s diction makes the swap feel both deliberate and a little sordid. “Trawling” isn’t “researching”; it’s dragging a net along the ocean floor, collecting whatever sticks. The subtext is relapse disguised as reform: a person trying to convert an appetite for distraction into something that sounds productive.
“I started slowly” is the most telling fragment. It’s the language of habit-building and of dependency narratives: pacing oneself, easing into a new fix, managing dosage. The line also reads like a confession cut short, as if the speaker knows exactly where the story goes next and doesn’t want to name it. The rhythmic structure helps: crisp absolution, extended drift, then a small, ominous deceleration.
Contextually, the quote is anachronistic if pinned to Mary Garden the opera star (1874-1967): “Internet” and computer games don’t belong to her lived timeline. That mismatch matters. It suggests misattribution, a contemporary voice ventriloquized through a historical name, or a quotation divorced from its source. Either way, the effect is cultural: we keep retelling the same cycle of abstinence and substitution, only the devices change.
“I started slowly” is the most telling fragment. It’s the language of habit-building and of dependency narratives: pacing oneself, easing into a new fix, managing dosage. The line also reads like a confession cut short, as if the speaker knows exactly where the story goes next and doesn’t want to name it. The rhythmic structure helps: crisp absolution, extended drift, then a small, ominous deceleration.
Contextually, the quote is anachronistic if pinned to Mary Garden the opera star (1874-1967): “Internet” and computer games don’t belong to her lived timeline. That mismatch matters. It suggests misattribution, a contemporary voice ventriloquized through a historical name, or a quotation divorced from its source. Either way, the effect is cultural: we keep retelling the same cycle of abstinence and substitution, only the devices change.
Quote Details
| Topic | Letting Go |
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