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.
