:: le silence du monde avant les mots, part 1 ::

"I am only on page 15 of night train to lisbon, but I'm already blown away by it. perhaps because I so relate to gregorius in his wanting to do something new -- crazy, different -- with himself and his life.
   I love the first sentence -- it grabbed me, with its brilliant backwardness:

The day that ended with everything different in the life of Raimund Gregorius began like countless other days.

it's sheer genius."

I recently finished peter bieri (as pascal mercier)'s book night train to lisbon, obviously. it made me think and consider and overall, I appreciate its insight. I finished it about three weeks ago, but I haven't stopped thinking about it, so it seemed appropriate to write something word-vomit-y because that always clears my head (sorry for yours).
   although I hesitated to write this, actually. I had enough reservations about the book to begin with, and then when I looked into what other people had to say, I felt dumb for liking even what I did (most of the reviews were negative). but then I realized, I am my own person, and I can like what I like, without being afraid of what people will think of me.
 
I took notes as I read -- personal notes, in my personal journal. they weren't written to be read by others and I don't write very professionally when it's only to myself ever (though let's face it, I'd try harder if this blog weren't just an extension of that self-talk); but it has my thoughts down better. so this is going to be a compilation of those thoughts and my now, at-this-moment thoughts as well.

   one and a half caveats. this book was translated from german, and sweet baby buttercream, the translator sucked. I think night train might have made a top spot in my favorites if it had just been written a little better -- the wording was really, really choppy in a lot of places. it was heavy and plodding, with weird words mixed together. I wish I'd written down an example, but the translator used intellectual words by slang words, in the same sentence; like if you said, "her pulchritude was on fleek." and it was like that all the time. not all of either category and not consistently (per character or something), so the result was kind of unsettling -- maybe the uncanny valley for writing, ha.
   caveat.5: while I was intrigued by some symbols, in some cases it seemed a little too much. too many symbols, too obviously... although I do like to chalk it up to bad translation. because who actually knows? not me! this part is in german, and we don't understand it.

   

but aside from these technical, writing problems, the content resonated with me.

   what I immediately noticed was something that scarily echoed my thoughts on march 21st.
[on march 21st, I wrote: "in this case, it's the latin that speaks to me -- latin can be austerely, expressively beautiful sometimes. like the letters that became roman script, the original trajan font: austere & immoveable & unchanging & beautiful in their untouchable aloofness.

   now I'm getting wordy."]

I was thinking about latin, & this is what mercier has to say about it: 

he loved the latin sentences because they bore the calm of everything past. because they didn't make you say something. because they were speech beyond talk. and because they were beautiful in their immutability.

what's crazy to me is that reading this book is like reading my own thoughts in someone else's words. it's eerie and thrilling; it's exciting and a relief, like the tear-raising response that carl rogers wrote about, when you feel understood.
   this relating to the text makes it hard for me to dislike the book -- it's like disapproving of me. which is weird. 

I'd like to go back to those minutes in the schoolyard when the past had dropped off of us and the future hadn't yet begun. time came to a halt and held its breath as it never again did. ...or is it the wish -- the dreamlike, bombastic wish -- to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now?
   there's something peculiar about this wish, it smacks of paradox and logical peculiarity. because the one who wishes it isn't the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. instead, it is the one masked by the future become past who wants to go back to the past, to revoke the irrevocable. and would he want to revoke it if he hadn't suffered it? to sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap -- it's the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself -- the one marked by events -- along on this journey. ... but then, if he [the younger me] had [made the choices I now wish he/I had made], he wouldn't have become a man who would later wish to return to the previous crossroads. can I wish myself to be him? I don't think I could be satisfied to be him. but this satisfaction can be mine only because I am not him, only as the fulfillment of wishes that aren't his. 

 ^this fascinates and disturbs me. fascinates because I love the thought of what makes me me & the fact that, were I a different me, that me would see me as me and be just as foreign to me as I would be to me. or it. 

   unfortunately, this is exactly what mama was saying back on february 17th: 'when you change you'll be fine with "you". you won't miss whom you were.' anyway, off the topic of mama being right (AGAIN) it also disturbs me, because

1: that kind of thinking & reasoning can get frustratingly circular & convoluted & ultimately petty and

2: it's ultimately petty and

3: I don't understand it.   

   like, theoretically I do, but at the same time, I can't fathom it. the human mind (or at least mine, that can't run 'firmly and accurately' through the alphabet to K, much less Q) can't formulate the two distinct mes that would be without dragging the one that is into the wrong equation. 

   but seriously, folks. really, what does it matter what we might have been? and here's where the pettiness comes in. being anything other than what we are is impossible & not as fabulous as it sounds. it's always that way; life's like that. we'll never be content. so we can reason ourselves around & around & question what makes us us, & what would be different if we weren't us but somebody else...and yet we can't change anything, and we can't even know, so why does it even matter. like, it's interesting, but it's nonsense. really, truly nonsense disguised by big words & falsely mysterious, grandiose thoughts. 

   yet I'm enthralled. I've thought about these same quirks of being thousands of times myself, so to hear them from someone else is in one way revolutionary and in another cozily familiar. I know these thoughts. I've thought them.
 
but it's more, it means more to me than just a weird thought-version of déjà vu -- it goes deeper, because I've never been able to articulate thoughts very well at all. I've felt it, but here it is, expressed. it gives me a voice somehow.

what could, what should be done with all the time now before us, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty?

I wonder about growing up. I am, right now, in the spot 'when the past dropped off of us & the future hadn't yet begun'; in gregorius's words, 'how much life [I] still have before [me]; how open [my] future still is; how much can still happen to [me]; how much [I] can still experience!' I don't want that to go to waste, and I want to live now -- choose my forked path now -- as I try to imagine both later mes would wish.
 
   being me me, though, and unable to state something without qualifying that statement, I immediately started doubting myself and my enthusiasm.
   I wrote in my journal, "the things is...we're back to pettiness. am I getting wrapped up in this retarded, 'deep' crap because I'm 19 and 3/4 & totally naive & totally too open to crazy ideas? no, I don't even mean that, because the kind of 'crazy ideas' I mean I want to always be open to. but am I too accepting -- too gullible -- & being schnookered by fancy words of wind that make me feel like a deep thinker while saying 1: nothing new or even originally spinning something old and 2: nonsense to fool vain (shall I say) autodidacts* into thinking they're very intellectual philosophical thinkers?
   and why am I thinking about this, and why do I care? basically, I'm becoming afraid that I will swallow the truth with the untruth & grow up to laugh at my foolish impressionable intellectualism that really was nothing & had nothing.
   I have nothing."

*this guy has some interesting things to say, but he seems kind of arrogant, which turns me off; and he refers to himself as an "autodidact", which I tried to subtly mock here. I had written in my journal a few weeks earlier about something he wrote, and referred to that in this entry. but sorry, that stays locked; I'm not recording all my private thoughts for the world here on the never-deleted internet.    

it's a hard balance, reading secular books like these and loving the theoretical what-are-we, where-are-we-going hypotheses, but trying to stay focused on the truth. yet there are plenty of things the Bible doesn't address, doesn't answer, and I think in that category of question marks are equally plenteous things we are free to speculate on. consider the harmless question: how do our perceptions of us differ from how others perceive us... and how do our perceptions of us affect theirs? (I'll talk about this more next post. mercier has some fascinating thoughts.) in some ways, that's not just harmless and neutral, but positively a great thing to consider, because it can totally make us more empathetic, thoughtful of other people, interested in and at peace with them -- "as far as it depends on you." and I thought about that:

"please note I am still thinking of all this in a purely secular light. providence & sovereignty & eternity are all very true things that I believe fully answer all these questions; but I like to ponder them theoretically. again, though: these questions, these statements -- 'he would have to be quite different from me...' -- are so unrealistic as to be contrived. contrived & therefore fake, shallow, & petty.
   do I become that by thinking about these things?"

you are what you eat, after all.

"perhaps I am fake & shallow & petty & contrived, just as the book is. but I relate to it, all the same.
   'all the same.' ha. what I mean is, perhaps we are the same, and that is why I relate."

reading over my thoughts again and being able to dissect them in my own mind as I copy them is showing me, no, I'm not shallow and petty. (I mean, this is what I think, not that I'm absolutely not. not that I'm not to other people. as for contrived? maybe, sometimes... :)) I think I am an over-analyzer and worried about growing up and knowing what is right and what is wrong. I made a good point when I realized I'm only 19 and 3/4 (although now, I'll be 20 TOMORROW. woo!!): I am still a kid, and I'm still discovering and learning and understanding. I'll never know everything, and I'm still early on in learning anything. how much life I still have before me!

I have a lot more thoughts on this book, so until next time.

of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one, at most, and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, its melody.    then, when we turn to these treasures, as archaeologists of the soul, we discover how confusing they are. the object of contemplation refuses to stand still, the words bounce off the experience and in the end, pure contradictions stand on the paper.