"Invalidenpark!" the usual mechanical voice of the BVG tram announced on my way to Berlin Central Station. This was 5 AM in the morning. I had woken up early to embark upon another journey to Bremen. Perhaps because I was half asleep, or perhaps because of the startlingly cold weather, there was an element in the voice that somehow charmed me. My mind seemed to wander back to the winter mere months ago, when I was in every respect clueless about the happenings that I would eventually encounter.
My memory of that time was harshly diluted. But I still remembered when the conditions had been the direst, I would take one of those nightly walks around the small patch of green in front of the building. I framed in my writings of those walks in such a way so that they appear less miserable than they actually were. And when every once in a while, another person showed up and interrupted my monologue (those monologues were often vague and ceaseless thoughts that I verbalized for the reassurance of hearing a man's voice), I would let out a silent gasp of exasperation, yet at the same time walk by, seemingly unaffected. I would prefer that a stranger kept away from the truth of another stranger, and sometimes, away from me.
I was smart enough, or to put it more accurately, conscious enough since the word "smart" has a certain connotation I visibly lack, to understand deeply that I was trekking on a road unknown and unguided, that a certifiable portion of my future was largely dependent on coincidences and luck. But it didn't prevent me from temporarily acknowledging, that I was the freest when I put my feet onto the ground. And my days back then centered around those walks.
Events quickly turned, even disfigured in the coming weeks. Maybe I got lucky, maybe my merit had made the gradual transition between pretense and substance, I got interviews waiting ahead in a consecutive line. And I played as wildly and as exuberantly as I could in these selection processes, priding them as my window into a world that had hitherto been unseen. I disposed of my ragged t-shirts in favor of suit and tie, and washed away my weary smile to put on a professional smirk. The change took place drastically yet unnoticeably. And it appeared, upon retrospect, that whatever tricks I had previously prized to console myself, were no more than the false and futile attempt at resuscitating a man who's already doomed to a swift and imminent death.
I discovered, that philosophy and wit, while quite helpful in alleviating the sufferings when there is too much to endure, and in calming the fidgety spirits when things go well, aren't too conducive to delivering me the truth. They aren't something I could resort to when I found myself lost or mired, or overly jubilated. They are merely an enlargement of my own will, and of my own emotions. This is not a comforting fact for someone who believed firmly the virtue of wisdom and ingenuity. But life after all, has always been a sort of giant pain in the ass that isn't terribly easy to sort out.
This small detour to Bremen, bland and uneventful as it felt, wasn't entirely useless. It afforded me a scant opportunity of sitting down and letting loose, as I spent more than half a day on the train and another half on the bench in the hill by Am Wasser. In Berlin there's also a road called Unter den Linden, which though close to Am Wasser in grammar, is an entirely different place. Unter den Linden with all of its grand shops and theatrical venues, is but a part of my daily commute; yet Am Wasser is my refuge. In this alien place I was once superbly familiar with, I got to look towards the past with more compassion and gratefulness.
The sky with its blue, the tree with its green, and the rustles of the leaves, the combination of them all, added with a tinge of smell that was moist and sweet, struck me as supremely mesmerizing. In it there's a certain sense of destiny that went far beyond what the word beauty could capture; in it there's an outstanding stubbornness, that even when the planet itself has perished, the stubbornness would persist. I used to denounce my group of friends who disliked such stubbornness, or "vasanas" in one of their Buddhist terms. It was only by sitting on the bench did I realize that, indeed, the stubbornness they had despised has also been elusive to me.
Recently I came across a piece in one of the older issues of the LRB. Despite being heavily abridged by its author, there's a clip in it that profoundly moves me:
"At 7 a.m., 'in a square on the outskirts of Padua, New Zealand soldiers are shaving, their mirrors placed on the side of their tanks.' At 7.30 a.m. 'twenty-year-old German Lieutenant Claus Sellier, wearing only his underwear, is looking out of the window of the Hotel Gasthaus zum Brau in Lofer, Austria.' And so on for another 250 pages and forty-odd hours. We even find out what Alistair Cooke had for breakfast in San Francisco (not grilled mutton kidneys but 'two eggs over easy, sausages, pancakes and syrup'), and learn that 'the dour-looking Molotov has a softer side.'"
Even when times are the most wicked, shaving, underwear, breakfast, and a hidden soft chord of the human heart march on.
