an unremarkable life

I often think to myself how unremarkable my life is, how extraordinarily dull and plain it is, and yet I still don't have the energy or the desire to move beyond this crab-like existence. The neutral, unheroic rolling on of time. Indifference of the soul, Fenelon would no doubt say (not that I've read him; just have lots of black notebooks full of hastily scribbled down words, words that seem to indicate some sort of wisdom, easily available without the struggle..the wonderful facade that quotations afford oneself!).

And of course, some people are quite content in that surrounding warmth, the daily rituals, meagre ploddings-groceries, banks, bills-,trivial conversations, a life without metaphors, the easy after-dinner smiles maintaining the surface illusion, the quietness and stillness of mid-mornings flatly refusing any existential questions-what mattered in life was to be part of existence, not possessing it- nor dreaming of any greatness or any deeper meaning, not railing against the lack of it...this is it, this shallowness that came surprisingly easy to you... And all the time one senses the slow drifting away from oneself, the silver disintegrating behind mirrors, the darkening of one's hands, the narrowing of the light, the forgetting of names.

~~~

Today, you woke early as usual but it was so dark you couldn't see the hands of the clock, just the empty white face, bald and absent-minded. Outside, the storm still raging, a cool freshness blown in from God knows where, the wind whistling through eastern windows, down empty hallways; the oblong flowerbeds filled with greyish water and debris, like a shallow grave; a small tree uprooted, the moist earth still glowing, clinging to the roots. A maulvi with an unbelievably pure white beard races toward you on a motorbike, his arms locked into position, his head steadfast, his gaze resolute, and the determined look of a man who sees the end of days...

~~~

Listening to Rachmaninoff's Vespers (Shaw Festival Singers). The pre-reflective naivete that the Russians so love. A knock on the door. Rashid, the secretary (a man with the roundest face you've ever seen). As he speaks to you you rather cruelly divert your attention elsewhere, trying to remember what he says so that you can write this blog! How fucked up is that! I am not kind, but I am true. What use is that, when it was kindness above all that was needed in the age we were living in. You needed an image to keep you going, to reveal something to you, but it didn't come. It was simple, not that complicated after all, but you'd have to painstakingly put it together in your imagination on your own, in the darkness.

"Do you have a minute?" he asks, sheepishly.

"Yeah, sure, what's on your mind?"

"Have you read Dr. Faustus?"

"Goethe, you mean?"

"No, Christopher Marlowe, written in 17__"

"Why do you ask?"

"He proceeds to try and explain something to me, but I don't get it. What's he saying, for Christ's sake? Concentrate. There's probably something to it. That makes you seem a bit mad, like someone looking for signs in tea leaves or something.

"In it there's a line where the devil says 'all these treasures, these women, are for you. You're a Ph.D. (what, did they really have Ph.D's back whenever it was written?), if God's dominion is the whole universe then surely you, with your education are a "little god"'.

"No, haven't read it. But what else do you like?", I ask, hoping he'll clear off soon.

"Oh, mathematics and literature"

This, I think to myself, is going to be a very long conversation and I can't feign interest any more. Keep the Rachmaninoff on and he might leave.

"Anything in particular?"

"A Passage to India and the essays of Lawrence. 'What is sex?' for example."

I can't say that I've read them to be honest and I wonder to myself if Lawrence did in fact write such an essay. Sounds plausible enough, but best to steer away from such discussions. Don't want to end up in a discussion of erotica so early in the morning-at least not with him!

citation: James Salter.