一个追寻者,
一条可怜虫.
Monday, October 19
Monday, June 1
6/1
Today in one of my habitual afternoons on my narrow front porch, I notice that spring has come back. The trees in front of the apartment building have amassed enough greenish sprouts that the green has become visible. I wear fewer layers of clothes at once and have already learned to appreciate the sun less than I did in winter. But this spring differs somewhat from the last, mainly because I have stayed home from the middle of March, when the weather was still chillier, and have not accomplished many things of note since then. I do not find the return of spring this year particularly relatable. The routines I have every week are all carried out from the same wooden desk next to my bed - working, learning German, and doing German homework. The memories I have with people are all from winter when the hours were still dark early and when I wore a jacket on top of whatever underneath. These usual or sweet moments have already receded, some more fully than others, but nothing new has replenished them. I am left to dwell in them, to look at them and to try to feel them like trying to gauge the impression of the sun from the balcony of a cloudy day. The birds chirping in the woods, the occasional eager cyclists riding along the road, and the added likeness of spring in the air hence feel a tad out of place with many missing parts that are nowhere to be found.
I look up to the sky. It is so bright that the shapes of the white clouds coming from the west cannot be seen exactly. From in between these clouds strong oblique lights cascade through and blast onto the concrete floor in front of my chair. I can feel a burning sensation through my pajamas but I cannot feel its warmth. Many times I have sat here and thought of many things, even though when seen retrospectively most of them are in vain or no matter. My sitting here, alone under the afternoon sun, with the entirety of my rented apartment behind, calms me in a way that I only quite rarely feel. Here, the white concrete floor is the stage, the wind blowing through the crevice on the door is the orchestra, the spring trees and the rumbling cars on Wolfratshauser Straße are the audience, and I, the conductor, unfold life's symphony into all of its unchoreographed movements.
This afternoon will be insignificant, and the day that wraps around it will be reduced to what I have written on this page. My concrete existence as of now, will turn into a shadowy silhouette, from which I neither hear nor see. This moment, when all the warmth from the sun, the green from the trees, the noises from the traffic and the fluffy pajama bottom covering my legs feel so tangible and concrete, will be frozen and gradually chipped away. And I am always marred by an inability to seize anything from it. Summer is impending and I cannot do anything about it. The months roll forward and so do I. My sitting on this chair static is but an illusion. Time has grabbed me like an ocean freighter carrying its goods - moving slowly but surely with a set origin and a set destination.
The street below my front porch all of a sudden has ramped down. There seems to be a respite from the flow of cars that I can even hear the slow grinding-to-a-halt of the S-Bahn that is at least 1 kilometer away. Aside from this there are only reigning silence and a torching sun. I lift my right leg so that it rests on the edge my chair and wrap my hands around it to, no matter what, keep a semblance of warmth from this afternoon in me.
I look up to the sky. It is so bright that the shapes of the white clouds coming from the west cannot be seen exactly. From in between these clouds strong oblique lights cascade through and blast onto the concrete floor in front of my chair. I can feel a burning sensation through my pajamas but I cannot feel its warmth. Many times I have sat here and thought of many things, even though when seen retrospectively most of them are in vain or no matter. My sitting here, alone under the afternoon sun, with the entirety of my rented apartment behind, calms me in a way that I only quite rarely feel. Here, the white concrete floor is the stage, the wind blowing through the crevice on the door is the orchestra, the spring trees and the rumbling cars on Wolfratshauser Straße are the audience, and I, the conductor, unfold life's symphony into all of its unchoreographed movements.
This afternoon will be insignificant, and the day that wraps around it will be reduced to what I have written on this page. My concrete existence as of now, will turn into a shadowy silhouette, from which I neither hear nor see. This moment, when all the warmth from the sun, the green from the trees, the noises from the traffic and the fluffy pajama bottom covering my legs feel so tangible and concrete, will be frozen and gradually chipped away. And I am always marred by an inability to seize anything from it. Summer is impending and I cannot do anything about it. The months roll forward and so do I. My sitting on this chair static is but an illusion. Time has grabbed me like an ocean freighter carrying its goods - moving slowly but surely with a set origin and a set destination.
The street below my front porch all of a sudden has ramped down. There seems to be a respite from the flow of cars that I can even hear the slow grinding-to-a-halt of the S-Bahn that is at least 1 kilometer away. Aside from this there are only reigning silence and a torching sun. I lift my right leg so that it rests on the edge my chair and wrap my hands around it to, no matter what, keep a semblance of warmth from this afternoon in me.
Friday, March 13
3/13
The many late and obstinate evenings I've had in the office finally seem to have amounted to something. In a few months of time, I would have a different title and work out of a different building. I am not sure whether I would then lead a different life. I do not know what to expect and the degree to which my expectations matter.
On every workday for the past two years I have traveled to the building complex along Wolfratshauser Straße to the south of Pullach, and away from the same complex a wearier person. On the door tag of my office writes my name and beneath it, my title, and in it I drink plenty of coffee and fight soundless battles against the screen. In winter I could witness daily the changes of nights into dawns, and dusks into evenings. Nowadays the days are longer, and therefore I could see only the latter. In these two years I have won many battles that won't be understood by anyone outside of my floor. And the more battles I win, the more I am defined by them. Words like "bridge", "delta" and "basis" are becoming more and more tangible; and words like "love", "literature", "belief" less so. In books I have read about people looking forward to things in a train station, by the river, amidst a desert, on their way home from a joint dinner, or around the turn of the street - I have not read about people looking forward to things in their companies - yes through companies wages are received and lives are lived. But there no one seems to have any longing beside having a vacation, and no one uses the word longing. And therefore, I simply prepare the slides and talk about the rises and falls of KPIs through a Beamer attached to the ceiling - Net Sales is up, OP is down, Volume is up, Price is down, compared to the budget, and compared to the forecast.
There are moments in the office when, temporarily setting aside my projects and tired of drinking even more coffee, I turn my chair to the right, and only a sheet of glass separates me from the world outside. In those moments time feels static - the contours of the building on the opposite side, the monochrome of the sky, and the distant white dot created by the hidden sun form a sketch painting with abrupt and meaningless contrasts. In those moments I feel the need to miss something, or rather many things, the more recent of which I still remember vividly. I could see them, put them on pedestals, or imagine around them, but I couldn't ever touch them. Their glow coupled with the restrained white lights brimming through the clouds somehow makes the office dimmer than it actually is, and the aroma of the just-now steaming coffee blander.
I try to sit straight to see the things perhaps more clearly. But before long the loose rub of my woolly suit pants against the black fabric of the office chair slumps me back. I then turn my chair back to the left, jiggle the mouse and continue the work. In the office there are urges for me to discard these short moments of musings readily, urges for me to make some progress and progress. For me, these urges are hard to ignore, not because they are more tenable or rational than the others, but because increasingly I do not know of what lies beyond them. What is an assistant bookkeeper without his book, a pharmacist without his pharmacy, and an office clerk without his office? In the face of these types of questions I have grown routinely timid, yet no amount of my inquiry has thus far produced a comforting answer.
Instead, I type on the keyboard piecemeal the thousandth line of code for an FX effect calculation, and slam loudly "Enter" at the last line break before the report runs through.
On every workday for the past two years I have traveled to the building complex along Wolfratshauser Straße to the south of Pullach, and away from the same complex a wearier person. On the door tag of my office writes my name and beneath it, my title, and in it I drink plenty of coffee and fight soundless battles against the screen. In winter I could witness daily the changes of nights into dawns, and dusks into evenings. Nowadays the days are longer, and therefore I could see only the latter. In these two years I have won many battles that won't be understood by anyone outside of my floor. And the more battles I win, the more I am defined by them. Words like "bridge", "delta" and "basis" are becoming more and more tangible; and words like "love", "literature", "belief" less so. In books I have read about people looking forward to things in a train station, by the river, amidst a desert, on their way home from a joint dinner, or around the turn of the street - I have not read about people looking forward to things in their companies - yes through companies wages are received and lives are lived. But there no one seems to have any longing beside having a vacation, and no one uses the word longing. And therefore, I simply prepare the slides and talk about the rises and falls of KPIs through a Beamer attached to the ceiling - Net Sales is up, OP is down, Volume is up, Price is down, compared to the budget, and compared to the forecast.
There are moments in the office when, temporarily setting aside my projects and tired of drinking even more coffee, I turn my chair to the right, and only a sheet of glass separates me from the world outside. In those moments time feels static - the contours of the building on the opposite side, the monochrome of the sky, and the distant white dot created by the hidden sun form a sketch painting with abrupt and meaningless contrasts. In those moments I feel the need to miss something, or rather many things, the more recent of which I still remember vividly. I could see them, put them on pedestals, or imagine around them, but I couldn't ever touch them. Their glow coupled with the restrained white lights brimming through the clouds somehow makes the office dimmer than it actually is, and the aroma of the just-now steaming coffee blander.
I try to sit straight to see the things perhaps more clearly. But before long the loose rub of my woolly suit pants against the black fabric of the office chair slumps me back. I then turn my chair back to the left, jiggle the mouse and continue the work. In the office there are urges for me to discard these short moments of musings readily, urges for me to make some progress and progress. For me, these urges are hard to ignore, not because they are more tenable or rational than the others, but because increasingly I do not know of what lies beyond them. What is an assistant bookkeeper without his book, a pharmacist without his pharmacy, and an office clerk without his office? In the face of these types of questions I have grown routinely timid, yet no amount of my inquiry has thus far produced a comforting answer.
Instead, I type on the keyboard piecemeal the thousandth line of code for an FX effect calculation, and slam loudly "Enter" at the last line break before the report runs through.
Wednesday, February 19
2/19
In this wintry Sunday evening large hopes are difficult to find. My room has quieted down from the activities during the day. Compared to say, Friday evening or Saturday evening, the quietness of the Sunday evening is vastly more resolute. It is quieter because of the anticipation of tomorrow - not Gibran's dreamy tomorrow, not Shakespeare's dramatic tomorrow, but rather the more logical, easily abstracted tomorrow, full of not murders, turning points, or candles but of work emails, green Excel sheets, and cups of machine coffee, things which, come to think of them, are so direct manifestations of reality that they only make sense in context of other terms like money, greed, and the inanities of modern life. In this evening, unlike the evenings in Berlin, I could not just have a walk around my favorite square to quell my thoughts - there's no square downstairs just as there's nothing in my life for which I need to take an immediate walk. I could, however, drink tea from a glass to the side, look at some apps from the screen, and open the window.
Pessoa wrote that the perpetual hope dissolves in the darkness of the night with a faint splash of distant foam. In the black sky from my window sit the silhouettes of the morning trees. They branch out upwards, but stop short of covering half of the sky. My Sunday evening perhaps is like the trees - dormant and selfsame in the moment, less dormant but still selfsame when tomorrow arrives. The laments I have this evening will not change tomorrow. They do not even forebode it. In the free and empty evening I could picture many things, having a coffee with the person I like, going to the mountains and to the seas, volunteer in a foreign country, etc.; but there are very few things I could enact, and if I could, it would only be possible during my vacation. Therefore, tomorrow I'll as usual don my business attire, put up my corporate smirk and ride my S-Bahn.
The evening is inching deeper, and the cars on Wolfratshauser Straße are getting fewer. The debates I have with myself are also becoming less eloquent. At the end of the day, perhaps it does not matter that I concern myself with different things this evening than I would tomorrow. The transition between days might seem significant in the moment, but it is rarely the case when viewed retrospectively. I tend to grasp, savor, and keepsake moments over other moments, thoughts over other thoughts, thinking that by considering something more strongly I get to cling on to it for a bit longer - I take pictures and write for this exact reason. Though I realize eventually what gets savored are not the moments or the thoughts, but rather the metaphors and recollections of them. There's nothing of wonder about this evening, in which I sit and look around like any other evenings. Only when the evening is viewed in conjunction with the materialistic and monetary tomorrow, can I use it to fuel a certain sense of relief and righteousness in my inevitable capitulation to reality when the alarm sounds in the morning - a formulaic banner of resistance before the ready surrender.
Perhaps there have never been large hopes, just that the brave man goes forth in his bravery, while the sheepish man surrenders in his sheepishness.
Pessoa wrote that the perpetual hope dissolves in the darkness of the night with a faint splash of distant foam. In the black sky from my window sit the silhouettes of the morning trees. They branch out upwards, but stop short of covering half of the sky. My Sunday evening perhaps is like the trees - dormant and selfsame in the moment, less dormant but still selfsame when tomorrow arrives. The laments I have this evening will not change tomorrow. They do not even forebode it. In the free and empty evening I could picture many things, having a coffee with the person I like, going to the mountains and to the seas, volunteer in a foreign country, etc.; but there are very few things I could enact, and if I could, it would only be possible during my vacation. Therefore, tomorrow I'll as usual don my business attire, put up my corporate smirk and ride my S-Bahn.
The evening is inching deeper, and the cars on Wolfratshauser Straße are getting fewer. The debates I have with myself are also becoming less eloquent. At the end of the day, perhaps it does not matter that I concern myself with different things this evening than I would tomorrow. The transition between days might seem significant in the moment, but it is rarely the case when viewed retrospectively. I tend to grasp, savor, and keepsake moments over other moments, thoughts over other thoughts, thinking that by considering something more strongly I get to cling on to it for a bit longer - I take pictures and write for this exact reason. Though I realize eventually what gets savored are not the moments or the thoughts, but rather the metaphors and recollections of them. There's nothing of wonder about this evening, in which I sit and look around like any other evenings. Only when the evening is viewed in conjunction with the materialistic and monetary tomorrow, can I use it to fuel a certain sense of relief and righteousness in my inevitable capitulation to reality when the alarm sounds in the morning - a formulaic banner of resistance before the ready surrender.
Perhaps there have never been large hopes, just that the brave man goes forth in his bravery, while the sheepish man surrenders in his sheepishness.
Saturday, February 8
2/8
Nowadays time withers by without an eye being batted. I have had many showers but few dreams. The necessity that I had in the past of having to ask questions and abide by tenets has worn off - in its place are on the surface, words like career, promotion, salary increase, jacket vs no jacket, IGM vs IG BCE, and descaling powder; down beneath scatter shreds of hope, love, and an empty antagonism. There is a full story behind each of the words, but the words together convey no novel message and accomplish no coherent whole. The things I aspired to could often be found in these words, and they would dazzle me if I dare look at them, but nothing quite corroborates them so each continues to linger singularly, like the lines in the SQL codebase I wrote for an analytics project that was later parked.
When I cherish something every so often I carry within me many added normative assumptions about it, like with career, I envision respect and a certain suspense of personal interest for the collaborative gain; with romance, I picture sincerity and genuine smiles and thoughtfulness; with friendship, I prefer it to not dilute with a difference in time or a divergence in location. These assumptions usually prove to be untrue. And the longer I have held these assumptions, the better and more capable I am of refuting them. I have a sizable reservoir of sly gestures, sarcastic remarks and terse adjectives for this particular use. In refuting these assumptions I get to feel unburdened. But because after they are refuted what I intend to cherish becomes less cherishable, I continue to hold on to them.
The reality I am faced with has the habit of being very multifaceted. In it many storylines, characters, and all shades of sanities coexist. However pompous I am, I would not regard my storyline or the world from my point of view as representative of the wider picture. But neither seems there any storyline that could be. Perhaps this is why Sartre says that men are condemned to be free and that Heidegger says that we are thrown into the world. The leftover option for me, under the curse of the freedom and being thrown, is then to attempt to flail at least more stylistically. My Barenboim collection, my work involved in the unnecessarily convoluted projects, and my bursts of obsession with good food are all part of this attempt. Tomorrow, I'm meeting with someone to whom I have barely spoken, in a coffee shop where I have never been; next week I will participate in a development center to determine how my skills can be better used by a corporation I work for; and then perhaps there will be beers, friends and some festive noises that narrate the same story in different forms and with new metaphors. For these events my dress code, the allowable amount of cologne, the words I utter and the pictures I paint will change significantly. And I shift between these events like a seasoned party animal going between parties, accustomed to the cycles of being eager and being tired without any unduly expectations or out-of-whack actions. After all, upon realizing reality as a whole as largely unalterable, I have chosen to focus my efforts on the more manageable components of it, and only concern myself nominally with the others things.
I remember distinctly though, that in the past I used to possess the capability to see things through some different lenses - in all of which a certain inner flame was burning, rendering everything I saw in hues that were more upbeat. I was marching towards somewhere. Since then I have spent a lot of time looking for that flame, through bubbly afterwork beers, hotpots, tanks, dates, anything, in hopes of finding it. And there, I have yet succeeded.
When I cherish something every so often I carry within me many added normative assumptions about it, like with career, I envision respect and a certain suspense of personal interest for the collaborative gain; with romance, I picture sincerity and genuine smiles and thoughtfulness; with friendship, I prefer it to not dilute with a difference in time or a divergence in location. These assumptions usually prove to be untrue. And the longer I have held these assumptions, the better and more capable I am of refuting them. I have a sizable reservoir of sly gestures, sarcastic remarks and terse adjectives for this particular use. In refuting these assumptions I get to feel unburdened. But because after they are refuted what I intend to cherish becomes less cherishable, I continue to hold on to them.
The reality I am faced with has the habit of being very multifaceted. In it many storylines, characters, and all shades of sanities coexist. However pompous I am, I would not regard my storyline or the world from my point of view as representative of the wider picture. But neither seems there any storyline that could be. Perhaps this is why Sartre says that men are condemned to be free and that Heidegger says that we are thrown into the world. The leftover option for me, under the curse of the freedom and being thrown, is then to attempt to flail at least more stylistically. My Barenboim collection, my work involved in the unnecessarily convoluted projects, and my bursts of obsession with good food are all part of this attempt. Tomorrow, I'm meeting with someone to whom I have barely spoken, in a coffee shop where I have never been; next week I will participate in a development center to determine how my skills can be better used by a corporation I work for; and then perhaps there will be beers, friends and some festive noises that narrate the same story in different forms and with new metaphors. For these events my dress code, the allowable amount of cologne, the words I utter and the pictures I paint will change significantly. And I shift between these events like a seasoned party animal going between parties, accustomed to the cycles of being eager and being tired without any unduly expectations or out-of-whack actions. After all, upon realizing reality as a whole as largely unalterable, I have chosen to focus my efforts on the more manageable components of it, and only concern myself nominally with the others things.
I remember distinctly though, that in the past I used to possess the capability to see things through some different lenses - in all of which a certain inner flame was burning, rendering everything I saw in hues that were more upbeat. I was marching towards somewhere. Since then I have spent a lot of time looking for that flame, through bubbly afterwork beers, hotpots, tanks, dates, anything, in hopes of finding it. And there, I have yet succeeded.