Solitude is in short supply; it is not a desirable commodity, of course, but everyone needs a little of it, fallible, weak, sinful beasts that we are, like alcohol or a fag, or a guilty pleasure only you can know, etc. There is no solitude left in this country, feebly, we are made to feel that all manner of extensible social contact, from fellow miserable lift-users to distant disenfranchised Chinese in Penang, everyone’s existence is brought to bear on the small window of our existence, with us peeking out at everything and our faces fixed in an expression of eagerness, interest and intelligence rapidly fading into perplexity. Wait, wait, what was that again?
A year ago, in school, I often bemoaned the lack of time to read – to process information, to take it in – I fingered fiction and magazines, opened my RSS reader (I must say, Newsfire is making me very happy, in a Tuftesque kind of way) every morning, guilty at the thousand or so preening and strutting unread articles, read 10 before my morning coffee, and consoled myself. But in reality, I read a great deal more each morning than I do today – Kant, Locke, Chomsky, Russell, each day, I ripped through pages and pages, speed reading both out of necessity and desperation, paraphrasing and engineering lessons, before trooping out to construct a reality I had always wanted to inhabit.
This year, I am reduced to being an engineer; wandering around an empty NIE campus on a Sunday afternoon, churning out correspondence and juggling plans and ideas as best as I can. I am fortunate; just last week I have been able to slip into the mix 2 dozen research papers and books by Freire and Marsh, plus the entire library of resources that my department has accumulated as part of its work – I am to write a dissertation for my MEd, which will inform and guide my work. But this great fortune is in the midst of chaos and madness, of a certain kind.
I return frequently to the notion of information, knowledge in its crudest form. I need to read, be it the Bible, dozens of newspaper articles, commentary on all manner of things from the railroad sleepers to moebius strips to hairy crabs and the mechanics of jet propulsion. Each serves a purpose; each fills a part of me that heaves into life each time. But that is what my education and upbringing gave me, an insatiable thirst for knowing that has taken over all else, that I have stumbled and fallen, and searched, and questioned, until, exhausted, I was unsure of what I was.
So, here and now, I am just merely thankful for quiet afternoons and books and papers to read, and a chance to construct meaning at work, to immerse myself, and on the horizon, other pieces of a jigsaw that I cannot, dare not mention just yet. Spilling over myself, remembering every jarring moment as I regard photographs, memories, thoughts, listing, desperately, every shred of information as if I could transform them into a discernable element of this…
Already I am buried in something else. Wait a moment.