Over the last week, I’ve travelled; ostensibly, for work, to a place not too far away, but in truth, I was hardly there. Instead, I read: Chicken with Plums, a lovely, lovely gift from a friend, far away, Seth, Haddon, Pessoa, Bloom, and yesterday, seized with a frantic desire, I sifted through the books at Kinokuniya. This morning, in between blank sheets of paper and the hieroglyphics of my profession, I slip, slide, into Marquez:
I became another man. I tried to reread the classics that had guided me in adolescence, and I could not bear them. I buried myself in the romantic writings I had repudiated when my mother tried to impose them on me with a heavy hand, and in them I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love. When my tastes in music reached a crisis, I discovered that I was backward and old, and I opened my heart to the delights of chance.
I ask myself how I could give in to this perpetual vertigo that I in fact provoked and feared. I floated among erratic clouds and talked to myself in front of the mirror in the vain hope of confirming who I was. My delirium was so great that during a student demonstration complete with rocks and bottles, I had to make an enormous effort not to lead it as I held up a sign that would sanctify my truth: I am mad with love.
- Marquez, Memories of my Melancholy Whores
I have, in a decade, sampled and sacrificed for the red herrings that many claim as truth. Even now, as I guide and educate youth, I am still exploring frantically, as I suppose I will be, when I am ninety-one. I am unsure; in my days of dilettantism and dabbling, has anything left behind more than scars and regret? Has there existed, in any form, the immortality found in each and every narrative, in Nasser Ali’s embracing of death, when love departs, the staunch idealism of Aunty Henny, and unknowable perfection of a life lived blindly, the atomised moments of languorous afternoons, in the only secular transcendance we’ll ever know, etc.? This immortality exists, but only in the books I hoard, in my room, and one day I shall sell everything else, as well, leaving only my books and notebooks, and just the photos that I can squeeze onto the wall.
I read, not as Bloom suggests, as solitary praxis, but rather, as denial. To feel greater the depth of my loneliness, the void between my experience and those of others, to aid the construction of unspeakable meaning as I babble to others, and so on. Slipping away from conformity to days of industrious labour, calculated to erase the tedium of a real life, and earn myself hours of solitude, on mornings like this.
Marquez writes: In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are. In all the books that remain, lingering and musty, in my mind, I find the beginnings of an end, where, weary and shrunken, I finally make the choices that youth cannot, and retire gladly to an inner sanctum, where I will measure out my days in pages and monologues. Did I ever really believe otherwise? Have I not read the signs?