“In this way it is possible to imagine that the essential tendency of motion, however lightning-swift it may appear, is toward immobility and that, however slow it may sometimes seem, it is continuously drawing bodies toward death, which is immobility. Olé.”

Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s ‘The Bathroom’ is a wacky novel about this French guy that decides to move into his own bathroom. This novel is pretty existencial and discusses multiple topics, but one of the them that stands out the most is of immobility. The quote above illustrates what I believe is the one of the main ideas of the book. Toussaint uses the image of rainfall behind a pane of glass to differentiate the narrator’s philosophy of immobility from other philosophies. To me it sounds like basically the narrator wants to do nothing. The philosophy of doing nothing, just sitting in your bathroom and doing absolutely nothing. Which is funny because the narrator does a lot in this short novel. Speaking of funny, the novel’s also pretty funny. There’s this scene with some Polish painters and an octopus, and the narrator can never find tennis shorts. Very wacky novel, and I do recommend it.