CCXXXI - to live is to get older

In earlier times, there was a Borders bookstore at Wheelock Place. It's funny, I write about past things now the way that people from earlier times write about past places. You can hear about such places, and see the odd photographs, but the connection with the physical reality they once inhabited is totally gone. What it meant to be there, what it was like, how it was lived in, the familiarity and the feel, all gone. The past entails an older place, once younger, and an older cast of principals, once youthful, existing concurrently, both now forever changed. We are talking about things that were once "the present", with all the fullness and immediacy and realness that "the present" is to us, us who live in the right-now of the present. Isn't it such an odd feeling to consider "the present"? to know that the present, however total and encompassing it is right now, with all its weightiness, significance and severity, will never be much more than it is as the present? The eternity of the present! And yet, as it does, time rolls unceasingly on, fore-running its ever-marching peoples. Tiong Bahru (塚 bahru), Badok, the Padang, Jurong East, Marina Bay, Fort Canning, Pulau Belakang Mati (Sentosa) ... virtually all the old places one thinks of, of which now only abridged histories and sepia photos on plaques, slightly forlorn, carry a reminder, the metamorphosing inhabitants of which no longer have the memory or language to reminisce, to provide substantial, deeply-rooted discourses of lives and lived-in-ness. We have so little "historied-ness" in us, nor the sense that any of that matters, until it becomes our turn to comprise old news, old history. I don't know, I love the sense of being connected with a place, of sharing deeply personal, even ancestral ties to the land. To know the lie of the land. To recall in the mind's eye vistas, scenes, scapes, the chiaro of the hazy sunshine, and the oscuro of the sleepy, staid earth. Megarry and Wade were right, land, real property, is fundamentally a special thing, not what some call a bundle of rights.

Well, there used to be a Borders bookstore at Wheelock Place. I would have gone there in my school days, with not much money to buy a book. Buying actual books was never in question for me, as a child of the nineties. Well, Borders was expensive, compared to Times (not to mention, Popular). In the psychology section was a book by Sigmund Freud, the Interpretation of Dreams. This was a virtually irresistible title. Well, I eventually bought it. To some dismay, it turned out to be very difficult reading. Between reading this, and Mein Kampf, I gained the impression that Germans are not fun to read. Of course, there were other Germans, up to even Schopenhauer, or Schopi, as I call him in my mind, whom you might say was intellectually exciting, but not necessarily fun, even then, to read. But for the record, neither Hitler nor Freud is fun to read, and one of the things they share in terms of literary presentation is that they are both fond of very, very long sentences, some of which are unbearable. Anyway, Freud was in the field of psychology, naturally, and psychology is inherently a difficult field of science to grasp, not to mention that the subject of dreaming is even more so, even more illusory, chimerical. I didn't finish the book. I did get that Freud understood the dreams of his patients as being wish-fulfillments, coupling anxieties, and sensory inputs received over the course of one or two days. He posited some concepts as being symbolic, such as representing carnal desire, but those analyses might have escaped me. At any event, the book sits in a box somewhere, unexhibited. I am not sure that I will ever desire to thumb through it again.

They say that dreaming is not special to humans. They say that the platypus experiences up to nine hours of rapid eye movement type sleep a day (night, rather), which may or may not be a lot for the platypus, but that he does it the most. Perhaps he does it when the nights are longer, in winter. After all, doesn't the polar bear hibernate? Well, I often have a dream of running away. It's unpleasant, because I am not, in my dream, terrifically good at running. I manage obstacles, that is true, but I do not manage them well. I don't think the simulation includes getting caught, or perhaps I exclude it. Perhaps I manage the mounting anxiety by shifting the narrative to something else, subconsciously. That is one theme that recurs. For my own reasons, I think I have seen through this dream. Another one that recurs, with some emptiness at awakening, is of having a loved girl close by. It's not a longing per se, but a kind of wistfulness. I could go on, but the man I was at twenty, twenty-four, isn't the man I am now, at thirty-two, and no amount of gentle recollection changes that. Which is not to say that I am proud of the man I am now, but perhaps I am a little prouder. I think that this vein of dreaming, over the years, acknowledges that. This dreaming wells together now a feeling more of serenity and conviction than of desire and pining. Little calming gestures, placid comforting, resting a head together, on a shoulder, or feeling for, holding hands under a blanket, bring courage and a little joy. The rising day feels like it lacks a little something, upon waking, but not something that upon contemplation will never be found again. So I take (if unfairly) what Eliot wrote, in his Little Gidding,

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time.