Peter.... (I don't know what to title this)

 Peter said to Clarissa that he was in love with a married woman in India named Daisy. He says he is in love but after leaving Clarissa's house he sees a lady walking along the street and just decides to follow her?! He follows her while watching in a lecherous way. He follows her all the way to her apartment while 'observing' her. If he was really in love, would he stalk innocent women and find where they live? I am not going to get into the later stuff when he actually realizes he might not be in love but just this incident alone says a lot about Peter. 

He always carries a pocket knife because of his insecurities and is constantly flipping it open and closed and playing with it. He may be in London right now, but I am pretty sure that he did this in Bourton as well. The book is constantly in these nice peaceful settings and for the most part everything fits in with that setting. Except for Peter. With his pocket knife and his stalking (I'm assuming this is not the first time) habits, Peter does not fit with the rest of the book. I suppose you could say he is a 'free spirit' but I think this is crossing a line. What will he do next? I think this is why Clarissa really rejected him.

Time in The Mezzanine

 After finishing The Mezzanine I am so confused about the passage of time. Although it is fairly obvious that most of the book is dwelt in memory, with Howie intensely scrutinizing every seemingly insignificant thing and making it matter but at the ending (at least for me) it felt like the entire book was just one loop. Howie starts by going to the escalators and riding them as he remembers all kind of things and ends when he gets to the top of an escalator. Yet the final chapter is only one paragraph, it does not feel like the true ending to the story, more like the Baker version of an epilogue. What feels like the true ending to me is the end of the second to last chapter, where Howie ate his cookie and milk, read the Aurelius book, ending when Howie goes to the escalators. Although this could be part of a “linear” story plot (I use quotes because I don’t know if the plot of The Mezzanine can really be called linear with the amount of tangents Baker goes, it is more like a tree) this passage seems to me like it should belong, in the timeline of the book, right before the beginning of the book, with a little bit of overlap as he already sees the escalators. This ending gives me the feeling of a circle, this could be symbolic given the circle of life, but considering every other part of this book that has no big ideas this circle of life theory is doubtful. I feel that it is more likely of two different options although I do not know which one it is. One, that the drone of a working life, even one of a man so childish as Howie is very monotone, so much so that it seems to repeat. The second possibility is that Baker literally wrote in a circle, with an ending almost at the same time as the beginning with no clear point of when the circle starting going back. This second option seems like something that Baker would do, as this is a book written to defy what people thought a book could be, this would complete The Mezzanine as one of the strangest books I have ever read.