Saving · the · world · before · bedtime

From the rearing towers of Chicago to the rolling plains of Wisconsin. 4 o'clock and everything is golden. The cornfields are golden, the leaves are golden, the daylight, our youth. I feel like I am in a movie with the most heroic, most nostalgic, glowing cinematography. Always in the distance there are forests of trees in the wildest colours - red, lime-green, tumeric, fading bronze - and in the foreground, so close we can almost touch them, are solitary trees. The detail on these trees is so crisp and intense I can see every twig on every branch, every vein on every leaf, every wrinkle in the bark. It is like I am on acid. These twigs and branches are half-bare and curl out in the most theatrical of ways, stretch out like they are alive. The shadow we cast on the cornfields beside us chases us down the highway, sending a ripple through the crop.

And when you see happiness in the streets? What about that? Do you feel lighter? Do you feel superhuman? And when you see a smile, do you feel hope?

But how long would he have been tortured by compassion? All his life? A year? Or a month? Or only a week?

How could he have known? How could he have gauged it?

Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.

...

After Tomas had returned to Prague from Zurich, he began to feel uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities.

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.

Tomas appeared to Tereza in the hotel restaurant as chance in the absolute. There he sat, poring over an open book, when suddenly he raised his eyes to her, smiled, and said, 'A cognac, please'.

At that moment, the radio happened to be playing music. On her way behind the counter to pour the cognac, Tereza turned the volume up. She recognized Beethoven. She had known his music from the time a string quartet from Prague had visited their town. Tereza (who, as we know, yearned for 'something higher') went to the concert. The hall was nearly empty. The only other people in the audience were the local pharmacist and his wife. And although the quartet of musicians on stage faced only a trio of spectators down below, they were kind enough not to cancel the concert, and gave a private performance of the last three Beethoven quartets.

Then the pharmicist invited the musicians to dinner and asked the girl in the audience to come along with them. From then on, Beethoven became an image of the world on the other side, the world she yearned for. Rounding the counter with Tomas's cognac, she tried to read chance's message: how was it possible that at the very moment she was taking an order of cognac to a stranger she found attractive, at that very moment she heard Beethoven?

Necessity knows no magic formulae - they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

-- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

you could live Descartes's dream argument? Overcome time and space? See only colours that matter and details filled in with felt tip marker? Have cranes and clouds dance for you, skies open for you, buildings splice apart at your will into the night??? The world would look like the most intense graphic novel, the most charming music video, it would look like how it was meant to look, and it would enthrall you, like you were just born.

London, and I brave the peak hour crowd. The tube is inexplicably hot, the air is still, a woman behind me is crying, and I am going home.

Rome, 10pm

We are in front of the Pantheon. A crowd has formed a generous ellipse around a man with a CD player, amplifier and upturned hat. People look out from cafes in front of brick buildings as the man throws out his arms and returns them to his chest in passionate vibrato. An anglicised Indian girl of about 8 is beside me. She breathes to her mom, 'This is magical.' Later we sit in front of the fountain, where we watch the two of them dance with a yellow parasol on the orange cobblestone.

Venice, 8pm

We are at the top of the bell tower when someone asks us where we are from. She is from Kazakhstan, 22, and the young man beside her is from Munich. There is polite conversation and they invite us on their drive into Florence the day after, but train tickets and accommodation reservations hold us back. She asks us if we mind taking photos with her. Her parents are under the impression that she is in Germany studying English for 3 weeks. We agree to pose as her classmates. At 9 we return to the Piazza San Marco beneath us. As Bocelli swallows the night we talk about all kinds of things. 'Have you been to Dubai?' she asks us. 'No. You?' 'No,' she answers, 'but I want to. I want to see everything.' Later that night we agree to meet in Florence 2 days later, and then they leave.

Florence, 9pm

The sun sets and Michael and Mira join us in the middle of Piazza Michaelangelo, at the feet of David. Over dinner they tell us how they first met. 'Normally I go for dance class late. But this day my mother tell me to go early. So I leave the house earlier and take a taxi.' 'I'm at a bar with my friend and I feel kind of tired, so I tell him I'll go back to the hotel for a while and then meet him again later.' He gets into a taxi and she is in the passenger seat. 'Since I am early when the taxi driver ask me if I am... O.K. to take this road I say yes. Normally I go like that-' she signals straight- 'but today I go this way-' and she signals right. 'It is not far, about... 10 minutes difference. When I see him come in all I think is, Oh, it is another foreigner. I ask if he work in the hotel and he tells me he is a pilot. When I talk to him I don't do like that-' she whips around, her body pivoting enthusiastically around her waist. 'No, I don't. I just talk to him like that-' she turns her back on him and mimics indifferent conversation. We are in hysterics. 'So you mean you never saw each other's faces?!' 'No, to me she was just another Kazak girl. They all look the same from the back,' he jokes. 'I ask him if he work for Air Astana and he tell me yes.' Michael is a private pilot. 'I ask him if he can get me a job in Air Astana and he says yes.' They exchange numbers and he gets off.

***

'But when I met him I never think that I would be here in Europe. In Kazakhstan very few people leave the country.' No one says anything for a moment. She turns to him. 'So I see you next summer, yes?' He pretends to check his watch. 'Maybe a little earlier,' he smiles. 'Don't worry.'

...

'Oh, man! man! man!' moaned Dean. 'And it's not even the beginning of it - and now we are here at last going east together, we've never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we'll dig Denver together and see what everybody's doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE.' Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, 'Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there - and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen! "Well now,"', he mimicked, '"I don't know - maybe we shouldn't get gas in that station. I read recently in National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in it and someone once told me it even had semi-official high frequency cock in it, and I don't know, well I just don't feel like it anyway..." Man, you dig all this.' He was poking me furiously in the ribs to understand. I tried my wildest best. Bing, bang, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! in the back seat and the people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they'd never picked us up at the travel bureau. It was only the beginning, too.

-- On The Road, Jack Kerouac

Now that I am free and my time is mine I spend it straining to achieve this. Conceptualising records which I pretend I am talented enough to make... Writing plays which are poorly-disguised manifestos and filled with endless dialogue and negligible plot. Naturally this is a metaphor for the place I am at in my life right now. Maybe once I have experienced the world I will be able to write plays that tell the most riveting stories with the most precise dialogue.

The last thing I want is to be many years older, and to stop, and ask, How did it come to this? What happened along the way? Huh?!? Wtf?!?!?!?! Where did it all go wrong

In 10 days I leave for Europe.

Would I be scared? Would I wish we had never met? Would it feel like coming home? Would I see my eyes in yours? Would people have said, ‘Yup, she’s theirs’? Could I have passed you on the streets and said, ‘No, she’s too young’? What kinds of T.V. do you watch? Do you even have T.V. at all? Are you half anything? Sixteenth? Do you dance to yourself? Sing? Would you have told me of your disapproval in a different language? You would probably have told me of your love through touch. What was going through your mind the last time we saw each other? What was going through your heart? Were you angry? Were you relieved? Were you crying? Were you calling out to God? Come, let us single-handedly solve the riddle of nurture and nature, that we otherwise could never dare to approach.

I know I cannot remain young and foolish forever. I know that statistically speaking I cannot succeed. Over the past few months I have read too many accounts of middle-aged Caucasian actors fed-up of always searching and never finding. I have heard enough about the Asian struggle in the Western industry. I know of too many aspiring stars and starlets vibrating voraciously, impatiently, gravitating toward and orbiting around the shiny hubs on the coasts of America.

But I also have read the brightest and most beautiful stories-- of people finding themselves, of vocations finding people, of soulful adventures, in the state of New York.

I cannot forget my purpose during the next four years. I must search until I am weary and numb and satisfied with the extent of my search even if I cannot be satisfied with the result of it. Perhaps things will be different then. After all things are already changing.

I do not know what will happen with my life. I do not know where I am headed. I am incredibly afraid. But I could not have more hope.

At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch.   The tree went back in the ground.   It became a sapling, which became a seed.
God brought together the land and the water, the sky and the water, the water and the water, evening and morning, something and nothing.
He said, Let there be light.
And there was darkness.
Oskar.
The night before I lost everything was like any other night.
Anna and I kept each other awake very late.   We laughed.   Young sisters in a bed under the roof of their childhood home.   Wind on the window.
How could anything less deserve to be destroyed?
I thought we would be awake all night.   Awake for the rest of our lives.
The spaces between our words grew.
It became difficult to tell when we were talking and when we were silent.
The hairs of our arms touched.
It was late, and we were tired.
We assumed there would be other nights.
Anna's breathing started to slow, but I still wanted to talk.
She rolled onto her side.
I said, I want to tell you something.
She said, You can tell me tomorrow.
I had never told her how much I loved her.
She was my sister.
We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
It was always unnecessary.
The books in my father's shed were sighing.
The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna's breathing.
I thought about waking her.
But it was unnecessary.
There would be other nights.
And how can you say I love you to someone you love?
I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.
Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar.
It's always necessary.
I love you,
Grandma

-- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
 

We are superhuman, we are elastic and indefatigable, we are fantastic, we are full of fantasy, we run, we seek, we are attuned to architecture and opportunity, we are alive, we are here, we are dancer.

Hi, my name is Sal. Interest me, disagree with me, tell me something new about the world, invent a law of the universe for me and maybe then we can be friends, potential lovers. Philosophise with me, let me assemble my thoughts before you, let us together learn of fatalism and faith, and one day soon I promise we shall answer the questions of life. Scream from the rooftops with me, put your hands up with mine. Stand with me, try with me, let us forever struggle to live fearlessly. One day soon I promise the cosmos will be ours, to cut up and divide.