Long time no see.
It has been nine months since I last wrote something free and useless. In three seasons, you and I must both have changed somewhat. Changed because of what? You could say work, perhaps, or study, or getting along with other people, but perhaps the most fundamental reason is always the space and time that never stand still.
How good it is to be young, because then you don't have to see how big the world is, and in that small, idyllic patch of time and space you can keep a few things safe. Beliefs, friends, the flavours of home you crave: all so close they feel like part of you. It's a pity that, though life can't be summed up as nothing but venting, compromise and apology, it isn't simple enough to keep that safety around you forever. Like you and me today: it's hard now to find that old feeling of being stuck in a corner and yet having all the fun you need. As we grow older, we feel the world shaking and swaying, and feel how small we are; we are always so easily pushed in one direction by some force, and moving away and chance meetings become a habit. The world seems to have no edges; even if there were a wall, stretching up and down and left and right without end, you'd know that on your own strength you could never walk there to prove it exists. Gradually you meet more and more people and see horizons further and further away, while your own memories, feelings and thoughts are so narrow and limited that dividing one by the other gives a value that sometimes makes them feel as if they don't exist at all. You and I become a drop of water in the sea, our individuality gone, our directions converging; everything has already been arranged as it should be, and within that we are born, grow old, fall ill and die, are glad and angry, sad and happy, proud and disappointed.
Now you have two selves: one that knows more, and one that is small; one that can do anything, full of spirit, with the universe in its heart, looking down from the top of the world, and one that is still the child who, at the end of the day, wouldn't dare step over the kindergarten threshold without someone's hand to hold, out into a world where everything is bigger and taller than you; one that knows there are many choices, and one that can only have one. Both contradictory selves are sure they are in the right, and both are restless, so you are often angry and dejected.
Something has to save this unsettled you. For me, one of those things is words.
There's a book called The Disappearance of Childhood, which starts by asking where the idea of childhood came from. One important reason is that humans acquired writing and printing, and so formed the system of media that, to this day, carries all human knowledge and feeling. This system divided people into those who could read and write and those who couldn't, and so we had children. They can't read or write, so they are outside the world of the written word, so in the time before they learn to read and write, what they see is all there is, and so that time is special. Conversely, people who can read and write can have experience and knowledge beyond themselves; the world of the written word can connect the small self with the rich self. I have made only one choice, but it's as if I've made the other choices too; from then on I am me, and I am no longer me; the small and the rich together form a new me; I am in the present, and I am everywhere; I know nothing, and I know everything; I am young, and I am old.
I am you.
That's why I need words. Besides the words that talk to others and have a purpose, there are the words that talk only to myself and have none. The universe has already confessed everything to me.
I seem to have said a lot of things whose meaning isn't clear; really I just want to try to explain why, after nearly 300 days, I am again writing down a lot of things whose meaning isn't clear. Free and useless: that is the power words give me. Here and now, in the realm these words make up, value can't be wasted, because there is no value; and time isn't frightening, because there is no time. At this moment, just as the infinite contains no meaning, I am simply here.
Nothing all that good, and yet already good.
2015.06