If life’s a journey, it’s a round one —and I feel I’ve started to get back.
Back to the core of what I am — that what you were before you began to deny it, adorn it, betray it, confuse it, belie it.
Slowly, unremittingly and savourily.
If experience has given you the intelligence to discern it and the courage to accept it, that’s it.
I’ve got both.
A young coworker of mine announced she was pregnant with her first baby. She looked so radiant and was such filled with happiness, it moved me.
This young man held a post in this office some time in the past, and then got a promotion and went elsewhere. He was liked and well regarded by his colleagues at work.
After he left, he got involved in high school activity as a father of two girls and was appointed president of the federation of parents’ local associations, which gave him some renown and made him kind of a (lesser) public figure.
Last week, his face showed up in a photograph in a local paper, because an old, leftist political party in quest of renovation had apparently sounded him for a leading place in its lists as an independent candidate. The article was badly laid out, though, and actually induced the casual reader to think that he (our young man) was in fact being engaged with the old, rightist political party.
When a guy at the office wholeheartedly, cheerfully, naively points to the young man’s picture in the paper and says out loud for everyone to share his joy, ‘Look, it’s <the young man’s name>, he’s on the news again, and this time big time!’ another coworker raises her ugly, anger-filled face to bitterly retort, ‘Yeah, but he’s joining the <name of the wrong party>’.
So there you have it, spontaneously acted out for the benefit of your eyes and ears —atavistic, careless, silly bonhomie (he’s our friend, he’s flourishing: let’s celebrate) versus sophisticated, pointed, self-righteous and hate-inducing moral and political judgmentalism (he used to be on the right side; now he’s mean, less than decent; he’s not our friend any more —quite the contrary).
Collecting sinners in an old tin cup.
I fully enjoyed Neflix’s Marvel’s Daredevil, season 2 (season 1 too, of course). I was:
And great acting too.
The last six fiction books I’ve read, I’ve dropped them. Don’t think they’re bad —in fact, I think they might be good. In case you’re curious, here they are:
All of them are widely acclaimed, but not my cup of tea —I’m afraid.
Something of very little importance happened a few days ago that anyhow showed how odd a thing friendship can be. We had invited our close friends to dinner at the house by the sea. I was supposed to drive later to the pizza house to fetch the food, and when I announced I was leaving someone said that someone should go along with me. I immediately refused, masquerading my reaction as politeness —no need for anyone to bother, you just sit back, wait and relax. The truth is I dreaded the fact of being alone in the car with any of them —and I insist, we’ve been friends for more than forty years now.
Not that I think that’s bad —nor good. Just implausible, shocking, uncanny. I wonder if there’s someone aside from my wife that I’d be perfectly at ease with them by my side in a car for a small ride to anywhere anytime.
by Michel Faber.
A good novel, original (the aliens are us; a self-sustained, self-regulating, hierarchy-free society of engineers) and well-thought, revolving around the themes of both the limits of faith and the strains of separation, or the impossibility of giving credit to any other reality than that we’re actually living in. I’ll read more from Faber.
Someone from inside went all the way out to stand before me and tell me in by no means a friendly or discreet way that didn’t I know that you couldn’t pay fines here, only get the form to pay them at the bank? I had actually told a young guy he could pay there right at the desk!
The problem is, as much as I’d like to know who it was who scolded me, I can’t, because it happened on my first week at my new post and frankly, they all were blurry faces to me back then yet. I’d really love to hate her and long hold a grudge against her but find I’m getting nowhere on that path because no matter how hard I try to match her face against the ones I’m able now to put a name on—I can’t.
And now that I come to think of it, it might be perfectly the case that I’m actually being nice to her, without knowing so. Such a shame, isn’t it?
I thought I’d had enough of working in the evenings so I asked for a transfer and got it. I like my new post and I like my free evenings. I do almost nothing on them; I even listen to music from time to time —I mean, sitting on the coach and just listen. Time passes by, and that’s fine with me. Urge is gone.
I wonder if you could say I’m coming to terms with my age.
So sad the night at Paris, so sorry for the victims and their families.
Let’s see they won’t come back.
