July 21, 2012
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Don’t let the panic bring you down
“Just as in the desert individuals must travel in large caravans out of fear of robbers and wild animals, so individuals today have a horror of existence because it is godforsaken; they dare to live only in great herds and cling together en masse in order to be at least something.” -SK
I’ve been coming to term with spiders this summer. I can stare at them for longer and not be so upset. When I found one in the mini van, I even helped it escape. It has been a summer of reconciliation.
It’s a very weird, blue, windy day. Like the whole earth is a cottage by an infinite ocean. I was walking outside and I felt like ancient nomads must have during their travels, like you are connected with everything, like you’re part of the wind and the earth and the history of things.
I feel like I have been scaling things recently; like I found a new plateau in life I couldn’t see before. I am sure this has happened to many people as they get older. Things you used to worry about don’t seem as important any more. And there’s not really a way to explain why they’ve become unimportant to another person.
It’s a good day the day you find out you’re nothing.
The other day I was looking at pants in a thrift store and one of the sizes was 34/34. When I saw that I thought of when Gandalf is looking for the history of the Ring and reads ‘The year 3434 of the Second Age…’
Some girls I’ve talked to don’t think there’s anything wrong with pornography, and I think there’s something they’re not quite getting. But other girls think any person who has looked at pornography must be a monster, and I think there is something they don’t quite get too.
Last Friday I talked to a hotel desk clerk for almost two hours and he had a lot of things to say about life, and he said most of them without using any words. I asked him how he knew so much about life, and he just said, ‘Listen.’ Then he added: ‘People never listen. But if you listen to people, you learn a whole lot.’
It is very relieving to be nothing. When you are something, it takes effort to maintain it, and you have to maintain it to everyone you know, otherwise the image you have of yourself will crack, and you will be very sad. Only people who know they’re nothing have any security in life.
I was reading The Problem of Pain the other day and Lewis presented the reasons he once had for being an atheist, and then he went through all the metaphors he sees for how pain might be a good thing, and how there once wasn’t any pain, and it struck me that it was all so complicated, and I felt for a moment like I did before I hadn’t had any of the thoughts he presented in the book, before everything had unraveled itself.
Someone told me that babies have to sleep so much because there’s so many new things to interpret, so much to take in. I feel like that must be the same reason adults have to sleep at the end of the day too.
In the thrift store I began thinking about someone saying they only buy things according to their own style. But ‘your own style’ would still be assembled out of items that had some sort of perceptual status in the minds of others; thus, you can’t really assemble a style all by yourself. You are always depending on the way others view things. It may not feel like it, but there are reasons you don’t wear togas or armor or monk habits.
The things you do that no one else will ever know: now there you may have the possibility of ‘your own style’. Without an audience, you might just start to exist. What do you think about when you’re all alone?
I love that people are secrets, I love that words can unlock things, I love that ignorance means a life of surprises. Don’t open lines of credit for yourself; find your blindspots. Life is here and will be all summer. After that, I guess we’ll see, but the world is turning blue and I find my yearning is growing every day.
