i finished reading dave eggers' you shall now our velocity today on the plane. travel, grief, searching, loss, being an outsider. what more could i ask for? i'm glad i finally picked it back up again.
i'm falling more in love with the idea of knowing the what, and reading a book to learn the why. a detective novel of sorts, with all the pieces laid out, and a gradual accumulation not of evidence, but of explanation.
already i don't want to leave. did you feel that air? it's different. it's african air. it's like mixed with the sun more. like our air isn't mixed as well with the sun. here they mix it perfectly. the sun's in the wind, the sun's in your breaths.
friendships, even temporary ones like this, were based on proximity and chance, and so rarely made any sense at all.
it wasn't a dull pain; it was acute, almost sweet
it's irrelevant. who cares how many universes or planes there are when they don't intersect? [. . .] but what i wanted, really, was every option, simultaneously. not in some parallel and irrelevant universe, but here.
but you're talking behind seven layers of denial and justification
as we walked under the infrequent streetlights we had two and three shadows, as one light cast our shadow up and the other down, sometimes overlapping. the lights didn't know what they were doing. the lights knew nothing.
we come and then we create things that will happen. . . half thought, half actual. it's a staging ground.
you have to forget about momentum and start again, and again, and again, and again.
at that moment i was sure. that i belonged in my skin. that my organs were mine and my eyes were mine and my ears, which could only hear the silence of this night and my faint breathing, were mine, and i loved them and what they could do. . .i was sure that was how people drowned; not with a fight, not with thrashing but with thoughts of rest.
i can't be alone with my head, Hand. i fear it. my own head! there was a time when i wanted and loved time alone with my mind. now i dread it [. . .] all the while i was caressing every wall of my head. i was wandering around my head, teary with joy, wistful even, loving the surfaces, the many rooms, the old rooms and empty rooms [. . .] but slowly these empty rooms were filled. filled with things so wretched and brutal that you could not have conceived of them at thirteen. and soon you find there are too many rooms, too many occupied rooms, too few empty ones. i walk through my corridors and i open doors and now it's so hard to find a room unoccupied or not full of screaming clouds.
it's too much to walk around with this skin and this blood - it all hisses at me. i sink into my blood and it hisses at me.
the idea was to solve the problems of the world via removal, withdrawal, starting with me.
why all of this? i want this cleared away. i have no use for this shit anymore. it's sending me back. . . i need less memory. no memory. i need
he looked at me like a father would, when a father knows his son needs a mother.
instrumental in traveling is the participation in it, the belief in progress, the witnessing of passage.
the only motion i knew was relative motion, the only speed that truly felt like speed was when i was speeding past things.
soft curves and such green. i had never lived anywhere with this kind of drama.
i couldn't think of anything i'd done in six months that brought me anywhere new or proved in any way i'd been there, that i'd been taking air from the world and using it to any justifiable end.
knew what was what, knew that none of it really meant anything, or meant everything but in a way we wouldn't ever really understand.
everything was wrong all at once.
this was very real. this was our lives, the whole of our relatively straightforward lives, concluding savagely on this bizarre note, someone splicing onto our happy safe wisconsin lives the wrong, bloody ending.
the only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us.
everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this i hated then found hugely comforting.
i would know that in any city, at an hour like this, there are people sleeping. that most people are sleeping. but that in any city, in any cluster of people, there are a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it's here that we need to be. that if we are living as we were this week, that we had to be awake with the people who were still dancing.
and i then would have the idea, seeming gloriously true for a flickering moment, that we all should have a near-death experience weekly, twice weekly-how much we'd get done! the clarity we'd know!
nothing we did ever resembled in any way what we'd envisioned. maybe we couldn't help but make a mess everywhere we went
always we learned things and forgot them. almost nothing could be learned for good.
i was so sick of my name it pained me.
-every story, Hand, is sadder than ours.
-every last one.
how much disbelief, collectively, must be suspended, to allow for tourism?
-but still there will be retribution. i have had mine. and we all are punished. it happens first within our minds and then in the physical world.
-no. there will be retribution. i have had mine. and we all are punished. it happens first within our minds and then in the physical world.
but Will, your life has been lived a hundred times. a thousand times. it's not all that great, really. don't take it so seriously. don't handle it so delicately.
i want none of my own thoughts anymore. i want to donate my head.
i am tingling for the world. but i was already raw. i didn't realize how raw. then we planned this trip and i thought i could do more, that i could do better. but now i want to see the end.
i live again. love is implicit in every connection.
we want the world smaller and bigger and just the same but advancing.
only intermittently did the world give us tasks, in quick beautiful bursts, that we had to complete and feel electric and roaring while doing so.
your destiny daily is determined by the failings of the world
you are usually there but you have to always be present [. . .] i wanted something to happen so my choices would be fewer, so my map would have a route straight through, in red.
no, they made it sound okay. it's like a density thing. apparently they wanted that density of soul. the density is desirable. apparently they see the soul the opposite as we do, where it's the lightest thing, this wispy ghost thing. they think of it like a mountain. like a mountain each of us carries around, and you want your mountain strong and dense, because that means your family has lived lives of great experience. but the trick i guess is to find a way to move around.
i planned nothing well. i dreaded being back in chicago, or memphis, wherever - the stasis, the slow suffocation of accumulation.
advice so rarely finds its intended audience
