CLXXXVI - in sepia

You know, when I watch old people, when I sit down with them, ease into a sort of quiet space, calm, homely, unadorned, I like to think of what they were like thirty, forty, sixty years ago. You find out that most people, when they get old, don't have pretension in them, they don't have that nervous self awareness, the sort of anxiety about their clothes and hair and how they carry their physical bodies. I mean yes they are very proper and decently dressed, but beyond that it's all just trappings, you get the sense. Old people have this calm, maybe which comes partly out of resignation, a sense that time, having passed them by, is thereby no longer urgent. But I would like to hope that that sort of resignation is not always in them a negative one.

And so I like to imagine what they must have been like, in their twenties, their thirties. Young, full of vigor, chasing the things we now chase. With time perhaps their handsomeness has faded, but I like to think of them returned with youthful faces, supple limbs, perhaps the impatience of their past lives. What they must have been like in the glorious old days, for I take for granted that everyone must have had something they were once proud of. It's not so hard to imagine, is it? That once upon a time this old lady might have been young, with I suppose some coquetry in her ... Once upon a time this old man wore a sharp suit and shiny black shoes. Once upon a time these people seated relaxedly at this table were young, chatty, happily active, listened to deng li jun, went to the opera together, worked as clerks and secretaries, nurses and accountants, lived, had lovers, married girls, boys, bought houses ... did all the things we hope to do, before growing old.

Old people aren't old man. We're the ones that are ... fools.

CLXXXV - love is nothing

To have been spared my harshness, coldness, weakness, and most shameful, is that not something?

A long time ago, I did what I felt was right. I doubt I could have been any more in love than I was then. I failed. I took failing as it was, failing. It took a long time for me to understand what happened, what I did, what failing meant. For a long time, I wondered if I fucked up, if I was destined to be fucked up. For a long time, I fought to remember who I was. And finally it was revealed to me, and finally my mind could see, that my love was nothing. I hated that ending, that despicable, bastardly ending, but I knew that I could embrace it as it had embraced me. My love was nothing.

The next one, I don't know what the next one was. In a way it felt like a giant wave had ruined me, and as the waters receded I could not quite prevent it from slipping through my grasp. Oh, it is one thing to feel deadly angry, it is quite another thing to understand that in the end, love was nothing, again.

All this time, I always managed to somehow drag myself back onto a little rocky outcrop that refused to crumble away. On it was written, in the sand, a few symbols which would depict a man in a man that would not die. I traced it often with my finger and repeated the motions on my breast. There, he was meant to be, and not to die.

And now I realise that I have no idea what I'm fucking doing. And even that doesn't matter, maybe never will. Maybe that man cannot be put to death, maybe the man must live, must overcome, cannot be shut out from the light. Maybe I am he all this time. Maybe I don't know what I'm fucking doing, and it is no bad thing, in the end.

In consolation, then, to be spared all my villainy, all this time, is that not something?

CLXXXIV - paradigmatic beauty

Each one of us is, at the same time, a human soul, not less by one part in any part than any other human in the whole of any intelligible account of history (think then of how much we are obliged to one another!), and, an amalgamation of billions and billions of atoms and molecules, each obedient, precocious little block sitting next to each other in just the right configuration, each asserting its own identity and peculiarity, in accordance with the foremost laws of the natural world (think then of how much we are obliged to nature!).

Imagine that; how beautiful is that? What is beauty, if not that!