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.
Wednesday, February 19
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.
