:: le silence du monde avant les mots, part 2 ::

home is the sailor, home from the sea, and I am home from california. (it was lovely.) taxiing down the runway, moments before we lifted off the ground, I realized that this was actually happening. it was a thrilling moment -- pushed backwards into my seat, the earth falling away behind us, I was on the way to my beloved california for a gorgeous wedding.
   because I've experienced the 'wow' realization factor, this really made sense:

"and there, all of a sudden, he realized that he was in fact making this trip -- that it wasn't only a possibility, something he had thought up on a sleepless night and that could have been, but something that really and truly was taking place. and the more space he gave this feeling, the more it seemed to him that the relation of possibility and reality were beginning to change."

lately I've been pleasantly surprised by the changing of "the relation of possibility and reality". more than just california trips, life in general has seemed so much more wide open and free: my "life may be all it promises," and that possibility is breathtaking to consider.

why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions within themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.

this idea of travel grips me. I may or may not agree with it, but it's a beautiful thought: wherever we go, we leave some part of us -- so that when we return to a place, we reassume that self, that life and its promise that we'd left behind. and "what could be more exciting than resuming an interrupted life with all its promises?"

um, yes, we are back to night train. (part one is available here.)

pascal mercier/peter bieri believes that "there [is] no greater distinction between people" than whether they are a reader or a nonreader.
   I feel you, brother.
   also, I definitely feel that it is hard to understand people who don't love to read -- partly due to my own obsession (you're different? what?? how can you?!) and partly because I can't imagine what it is like to be someone else, in all literal-ness. I try, of course, but we all have our own idea of even what 'understanding' someone else is, and it's all based foundationally on whom we ourselves are.
   I love mercier's thoughts on this. [he's writing about seeing his own reflection in a window, and at first not recognizing himself, but judging the apparent stranger on first glance.]

is it the same with others: that they don't recognize themselves in their outside? that the reflection seems like a stage set full of crass distortion? that, with fear, they note a gap between the perception others have of them and the way they experience themselves? that the familiarity of inside and the familiarity of outside can be so far apart that they can hardly be considered familiarity with the same thing?... even the outside world of an inside world is still a piece of our inside world, not to mention the thoughts we make about the inside world of strangers and that are so uncertain and unstable that they say more about ourselves than about others.

   so person A sees person B. A interprets B through A's own lens, a double distortion: B is presenting himself as B either wants or cannot help, but that may not articulate B's real self; while A sees and interprets that projection through A's own distorted understanding, just by being A.
   for between us there is not only the deceptive outside world, but also the delusion that exists of it in every inside world. persons A and B see the same outside world -- by "see" I mean "perceive" -- differently because of whom they are, differently, inside.
   isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their own imaginations? ... that was also true of looks. looks weren't there and were read. looks were always looks read into. only as read into did they exist.
   like, it's a wonder any two humans get along at all, ever.

when we talk about ourselves, about others, or simply about things, we want -- it could be said -- to REVEAL ourselves in our words: we want to show what we think and feel. ...[but] not only do we reveal ourselves with our words, we also betray ourselves. we give away a lot more than we wanted to reveal, and sometimes it's the exact opposite. and the others can interpret our words as symptoms for something we ourselves may not even know. as symptoms of the sickness of being us. it can be amusing when we regard others like this, it can make us more tolerant, but also put ammunition in our hands. and the moment we start speaking, if we think that others are doing the very same thing with us, the word can stick in our throat and fear can make us mute forever. 

   words. words are so important.

"'so the word is the light of men,' [silveira] said. 'and so things exist properly only when they are grasped in words.'
'and the words have to have a rhythm,' said gregorius. 'a rhythm as the words have in st. john, for example. only then, only when they are poetry, do they really shed light on things. in the changing light of the words that same things can look quite different.'"
   and as gregorius reads: you know, thinking is the second most beautiful thing. the most beautiful thing is poetry. if there were poetic thinking and thinking poetry -- that would be paradise.

but as without words you can't have a worthwhile book -- or any kind of book, really -- nor can you have a book that doesn't deal with love and/or death. yup, you know it's coming.
   in a way, I think gregorius's new realizations of the world around him are prompted by approaching death: the reality that life is finite and he is sitting still in a moving world, watching others pass. [this is an important topic; possibly The most important topic in the book, and so I will devote part three in this series to the symbols and themes and my closing thoughts on all of it (probably erroneous but so good to get off my chest).]
   a little necessary story background: the main character, raimund gregorius, travels to lisbon on a freak whim and ends up spending his time researching the life of dr. amadeus de prado, who also wrote a philosophical book-thing. RG has come across this book and he falls in love with it and wants to find out more about its author; along the way, he also finds out more about himself. ...duh. excerpts from the main book are in quotes, but I've italicized the book-within-the-book quotes for clarity; although since I didn't explain that till now, you're probably super-confused. I don't blame you.
 
   so. love, argues dr. prado in his book, is made of three more or less transient emotions/feelings: desire, pleasure, and security -- but he also holds that love cannot last because feelings cannot last. they cannot weather life and stay intact.
   "that's why loyalty was important. it was not a feeling, he thought, but a will, a decision, a partisanship of the soul. something that turned the accident of encounters and the contingency of feelings into a necessity. a breath of eternity, he said, only a breath, but all the same."

themes of transience, death and the fear of death, consistently recur, perhaps because love and loyalty are such struggles for prado. one of his most important relationships, his best-friendship with a man named jorge, falls apart seemingly inexplicably. this crushes him. when gregorius tracks jorge down, the man tells him, "I'm glad I have the pharmacy. I can live there in our friendship. and occasionally I succeed in thinking that we never lost each other. that he just died."
   as both the book and prado's life draw to an end, he starts thinking more about loneliness, meaning, death and the Living's reaction to it. his best friend has a crisis at one point, before their friendship ends, and he starts to consider it: jorge had always wanted -- always planned -- on learning how to play the piano. somehow he has come up with the number of years it would take to become concert-pianist proficient at it, but one night it hits him that he's too old. he won't, in all probability, live long enough to make it to the end of those years, and it scares him. he is terrified and helpless.

the bright awareness of finitude that assaulted Jorge in the middle of the night and that I have to inflame in many of my patients with the words announcing the fatal diagnosis to them, disturbs us like nothing else because often without knowing it, we live toward such wholeness and because every moment we live to the fullest draws its liveliness from the fact that it represents a piece of the puzzle of that unknown wholeness. if the certainty befalls us that it will nevermore be achieved, this wholeness, we suddenly don't know how to live the time that can no longer be part of a whole life. that is the reason for a strong, distressing experience of some of my doomed patients: they no longer know what to do with their time, however short it has become.

prado addresses this same thing again, many chapters later, hoping to have fundamentally understood the human fear of death.

the fear that life remained incomplete, a torso; the awareness of no longer being able to become the one we aimed to be. that's how we had finally interpreted the fear of death. but how, I asked, can the missing wholeness and coherence of life be feared when it's not experienced at all as soon as it has become an irrevocable fact? [if life, when done, isn't to our living satisfaction, what does it matter: we are dead.] ...why don't I want to know what I thought and wrote back then? whence this indifference? is it indifference? or is the loss greater, deeper? to want to know how one thought before and how it became what one thinks now: that, too, if it existed, was also part of the wholeness of life. so had I lost what makes death fearsome? the belief in a coherence of life worth struggling for and which we try to wrest from death?

he takes a final trip, alone, to finisterre (in spain. robert service wrote a great poem about the finistère in france, if you're interested). here at the end of his life, at the end of relationships, at the end of his hope and belief in anything, at the end of the earth, he really comes to terms with the emptiness of existence he has reasoned himself into.

finis terrae. never have I been so awake as there, and so sober. since then, I know: my race is at an end. a race I didn't know I was running, always. a race without rivals, without purpose, without reward. wholeness? espejismo, say the spaniards. I read the word in the newspapers on those days, it's the only one I still know. mirage. fata morgana. our life, those are fleeting formations of quicksand, formed by one gust of wind, destroyed by the next. images of futility that blow away even before they are properly formed.