Bremen had started to rain
Again
In my daily morose
Of having carried out life
Friday, March 17
Saturday, March 4
3/4
I'm quite fond of the room that I've gotten. The whole area of roughly fifteen square meters, perhaps twice or three times larger than the room that I had back in Berlin, is mine, and mine alone. Without the mental prerequisite of having to accommodate a roommate, I get to indulge myself in the great liberty of having neither a so-to-say life nor a particular haste in maintaining it.
The sole downfalls I have observed thus far, are the dodgy silverfishes that occasionally spring up, and the nocturnal scenery through the bedroom windows. The former I would promptly put out, yet the latter leaves me helpless. My room is situated towards the more academic side of the campus, where there are lanes that allow the students to pass between different classes and their room. These lanes are lit during the night with a very inconsistent set of lamps. From a total of nine lamps I could immediately count, five are emitting white-colored lights while the remaining four are emitting yellow-colored lights. If I could accept such idiocy with the usual spiritual victory of having had accepted a wider and more general idiocy in this campus, I couldn't really come to terms with the perpetual luminance with which they shine. Every evening, when I pull up the curtain, I would be bedazzled with a maelstrom of white-and-yellow dots that seem to assert their existence as the foremost condition of the evening; when I drop the curtain, a sizable variety of shapes, from parallelograms to arrows to oblique lines would beam themselves onto the upper three sides of the wall with a matter-of-factness of a PowerPoint presentation - and among many other things, a PowerPoint presentation is at the relative bottom of what I would appreciate before sleep.
Almost tantamount to the lady's cough at a piano concert or the single dead pixel on a newly purchased phone, the bare-bone exuberance and artificiality of the lights make my life today almost more tangible and realistic than it actually is, thanks to a visceral and overarching rage that it induces. When I lean on the windowsill with the inner hollowness that it takes to look at the stars and ponder upon their meaning, nine inevitable rays penetrate my retina and begin to flash like PSY's Gangnam Style. And it is grotesque and almost entertaining to witness the careful assembly of words, music and thoughts and the swift collapse of them all after. Simply no philosophy of Sartre could match the might of BuzzFeed, no prelude of Chopin could mimic the chill of K-Pop, and no composure of me could stand the invasive lighting at the Jacobs University. I would then close the curtain like a concert conductor at a beer pong party, leaving only after the mental readiness for the pong and before the physical sacrilege of the beer.
When I'm shut off in the bedroom, there is not really a sign for me reaffirm the world outside. David Foster Wallace wrote, "Everything in my immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence". Most of the time I have not the effrontery to act upon what he has claimed. However, when I'm alone in my bedroom, as when myriad other men and women are alone in their bedrooms, surrounded by all the parallelograms and lines, screens and slippers, wine glasses and books, toilet seats and water taps, I no longer feel the obligation to subscribe to the background impulse of coquetry as I would when I'm more connected with other people. I would not have to button my jeans completely; I would not have to sit upright; I would not even have to speak to be understood.
But my self-absorption was interrupted when a gentleman screamed self-absorbingly in front of the building; he was uttering something to another person, but I was not able to register what he meant because his words were already too far apart when they reached my bedroom. I heard "like", "I", "just", some laughters in-between, and a lot of emotions. Then, the voice subsides, the laughter stops, the emotion disappears, and only the low hum of the wind scraping against the earth continues. I presume that the voice is still lingering somewhere, but has simply become more inaudible as the gentleman is more distant from me.
I'm now sitting on my bed sheet with the little stars on it, thinking about the hotpot tomorrow that I'll eat with a group of friends. There surely would be voices, laughters and emotions when we convene, followed by a return of silence when we leave. I'm glad that I would be having hotpot with friends tomorrow, yet sad that we'd eventually have to leave, and I don't know which way should I feel.
I'm slightly puzzled and a bit tired - and I've got nothing to put forth anymore. I'd just fidget a bit more and sleep.
The sole downfalls I have observed thus far, are the dodgy silverfishes that occasionally spring up, and the nocturnal scenery through the bedroom windows. The former I would promptly put out, yet the latter leaves me helpless. My room is situated towards the more academic side of the campus, where there are lanes that allow the students to pass between different classes and their room. These lanes are lit during the night with a very inconsistent set of lamps. From a total of nine lamps I could immediately count, five are emitting white-colored lights while the remaining four are emitting yellow-colored lights. If I could accept such idiocy with the usual spiritual victory of having had accepted a wider and more general idiocy in this campus, I couldn't really come to terms with the perpetual luminance with which they shine. Every evening, when I pull up the curtain, I would be bedazzled with a maelstrom of white-and-yellow dots that seem to assert their existence as the foremost condition of the evening; when I drop the curtain, a sizable variety of shapes, from parallelograms to arrows to oblique lines would beam themselves onto the upper three sides of the wall with a matter-of-factness of a PowerPoint presentation - and among many other things, a PowerPoint presentation is at the relative bottom of what I would appreciate before sleep.
Almost tantamount to the lady's cough at a piano concert or the single dead pixel on a newly purchased phone, the bare-bone exuberance and artificiality of the lights make my life today almost more tangible and realistic than it actually is, thanks to a visceral and overarching rage that it induces. When I lean on the windowsill with the inner hollowness that it takes to look at the stars and ponder upon their meaning, nine inevitable rays penetrate my retina and begin to flash like PSY's Gangnam Style. And it is grotesque and almost entertaining to witness the careful assembly of words, music and thoughts and the swift collapse of them all after. Simply no philosophy of Sartre could match the might of BuzzFeed, no prelude of Chopin could mimic the chill of K-Pop, and no composure of me could stand the invasive lighting at the Jacobs University. I would then close the curtain like a concert conductor at a beer pong party, leaving only after the mental readiness for the pong and before the physical sacrilege of the beer.
When I'm shut off in the bedroom, there is not really a sign for me reaffirm the world outside. David Foster Wallace wrote, "Everything in my immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence". Most of the time I have not the effrontery to act upon what he has claimed. However, when I'm alone in my bedroom, as when myriad other men and women are alone in their bedrooms, surrounded by all the parallelograms and lines, screens and slippers, wine glasses and books, toilet seats and water taps, I no longer feel the obligation to subscribe to the background impulse of coquetry as I would when I'm more connected with other people. I would not have to button my jeans completely; I would not have to sit upright; I would not even have to speak to be understood.
But my self-absorption was interrupted when a gentleman screamed self-absorbingly in front of the building; he was uttering something to another person, but I was not able to register what he meant because his words were already too far apart when they reached my bedroom. I heard "like", "I", "just", some laughters in-between, and a lot of emotions. Then, the voice subsides, the laughter stops, the emotion disappears, and only the low hum of the wind scraping against the earth continues. I presume that the voice is still lingering somewhere, but has simply become more inaudible as the gentleman is more distant from me.
I'm now sitting on my bed sheet with the little stars on it, thinking about the hotpot tomorrow that I'll eat with a group of friends. There surely would be voices, laughters and emotions when we convene, followed by a return of silence when we leave. I'm glad that I would be having hotpot with friends tomorrow, yet sad that we'd eventually have to leave, and I don't know which way should I feel.
I'm slightly puzzled and a bit tired - and I've got nothing to put forth anymore. I'd just fidget a bit more and sleep.
