in your thirties everything needs fixing. i bought a toolbox for this. filled it with equipment my father once owned to keep our home from crumbling. i purchased tools with names & functions unknown to me. how they sat there on their shelf in plastic packaging with price tags screaming: hey lady, you need this! like one day i could give my home & everything living inside it the gift of immortality, to be a historical monument the neighbor’s would line up to visit even after i’m gone & shout: damn that’s a nice house! i own a drill now, with hundreds & hundreds of metal pieces i probably won’t use or use in the wrong ways but what i’m certain of, is still, the uncertainty of which tools repair the aging dog, the wilting snake plant, the crow’s feet under my eyes, the stiff knee or bad back. & maybe this is how it is—how parts of our small universe dissolve like sugar cubes in water—a calling to ask us to slow our busy breathing so we can marvel at its magic. because even the best box of nails are capable of rust. because when i was a child i dropped a cookie jar in the shape of noah’s ark, a family heirloom that shattered to pieces. the animals broke free, zebras ran under the kitchen table, the fractured lion roared by the front door & out of the tool cabinet i snagged duck tape & ceramic glue. pieced each beast back to their intended journey. because that afternoon when my father returned from work i confessed & he sat the jar on the counter only to fill it with pastries. how the cracks of imperfection mended by my hands laid jagged. chipped paint sliced across a rhino’s neck. every wild animal lined up against the boat— & a flood of sweet confections waiting inside.
After a long absence over here- years long absence-, in a nostalgic rush for times long gone- my early twenties-, I caught myself once again at the gates of my old Tumblr account and still able to remember the password that would let me in. With quiet steps, as one would stroll inside a centuries-old cathedral, looking at the posts, as one would look at colourful stained glass depictions of antiquity, and no actual memory of when was the last time I shared something here, I walked into an encounter with an old version of myself.
Standing face to face to that version of myself, yes, I found nostalgia, but the one you can feel when you go back to the childhood house, to that romanticized memory of the early years, when everything was exciting and shiny, to that world you didn´t know held so much magic in it until you were far enough to see it in perpective. Standing face to face to that old version of myself, certainly was like finding home.
I looked into his eyes- mine- and I looked into a mirror, I found that that boy in his twenties from some ten years ago and the thirty-one years old man that I am now, still have so much in common, both of them still want to eat the world and both of them have the same interests (we both are still very much in love with art, fashion, literature, cinema, beautiful flowers in the countryside and beutiful buildings in the city, languages, and an assorment of many other things). Maybe he used to look at the world with a little more naïveté and I am now certaily more experienced (I have seen part of the world, I’ve listened to languages strange to my ear, I’ve submerged my feet in a different sea and crossed the ocean, I’ve kissed foreign tongues from far off lands, I’ve loved, my heart has been broken and mended ,and I’ve never regretted it) and maybe at some point along the way I thought I let him down, but in fact, I’ve saved him.
I think of myself when I was seventeen, I think of myself when I was twenty-two, I think of them and I say “do it for them”. They deserve it and I deserve it. That boy that used to be me is my engine now, my motivation, the fuel to keep walking forward. I owe it to him. I owe it to myself.
Fun fact: “Mishima’s only meeting with Dazai, in January 1947, is now a famous incident in Japanese literary history. A circle of fledgling writers had persuaded Dazai to join them for an afternoon of talk and drinking… Mishima went along with a young playwright named Yashiro, an avid admirer of Dazai’s. The bottles were passed from mouth to mouth, Dazai proceeded to get quite drunk at once, and the others followed. Mishima, who did not drink, sat stiffly apart watching in silence. Abruptly, during a drunken lull in the conversation, he moved forward to confront Dazai, looked him straight in the eye and said, smiling, “I don’t like your writing.” According to Mishima, describing the encounter sixteen years later, “Dazai peered at my face and then drew back slightly, looking as if he had been caught off his guard. But he recovered instantly and, turning halfway toward Kamei, said to no one in particular, ‘But he’s here, isn’t he, so he must think I’m pretty good; he must like what I do or he wouldn’t be here.'”
Later, Mishima said-"Naturally I recognize Dazai’s rare talent; and yet I know of no other writer who from my very first contact with him filled me with so violent a physiological revulsion. Possibly … this was due to my immediate sense that Dazai was a writer at pains to expose precisely that which I most wanted to conceal in myself.”
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Sufferings of the World”, Parerga and Paralipomena (via philosophybits)
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