Nostalgia for Something Unknown
I've just checked myself into a hostel. It
was quite a walk from the conference, and I enjoyed the walk. It was
raining and the streets were almost deserted. I walked through the wet
quiet streets, lit with the surreal orange of street lights, and I felt strange and
lonely but not unpleasant. I felt as I often felt when I was traveling
on my own, in days gone by - every house I walked past made me
feel in my stomach how incomprehensibly large the world is. It takes me
by surprise sometimes, this feeling, and touches me deeply, and it feels
heavy like nostalgia and comes with a sort of pain but it is a feeling I
do not resent and do not want to rid myself of.
In these moments I feel discordant, disconnected, slightly outside of myself. I feel a strange longing and a deep emotion which is akin to pain but which is not pain. I feel like crying, for culture, for the immensity of humanity, and the tininess of my life, but it is not a crying sad feeling of unpleasantness but an overwhelming surge of emotion, undifferentiated. It is neither sad nor happy, just heavy, voluminous, dense, inside me and engorging me.
I feel so odd being in this world sometimes. I walk through a darkened street and see through the double-pane insulation of a kitchen window, a woman washing dishes. A woman with no background in common with me, to whom I am literally nothing, I do not exist. Right now, as I write this, there are people being beaten to into a coma, people lying in a field of corn watching the crows, making love in a satin-sheeted bed, screaming with pain, ecstasy, seeing their father for the first time in their lives, seeing their father for the last time in their lives, dying, being born, existing on subsistence on the edge of a rain-forest, people traipsing to work through a dusty Mexican street, leading functionaries of totalitarian societies ordering their bedclothes changed, a guerilla warrior on a mattress in a burnt-out building crying bitterly, wrackingly for his past, a nondescript women washing the tomato and onion sauce and pieces of left-over noodles from her Ikea dishes in a German suburb.
The variety of human experience staggers me, almost brings me to a halt sometimes with an outpouring, a shuddering hit, like a cinematic zoom-out.
My life has an ordinariness which is both banal and surprising to me. I am comfortable in my life and although I am not content, this is despite the blessedness of my circumstances. Despite not believing in It, I thank God for the mere fact of my being a being, a perceiving entity, something that it is like to be. I am grateful beyond mere happiness or sadness for my having emotion, for being sometimes overwhelmed, being shuddered from within. I give thanks for the insane privilege of being able to experience walking in a cobbled street after the rain in a bland foreign city.
It is an honour indeed to be an observer of this world.
In these moments I feel discordant, disconnected, slightly outside of myself. I feel a strange longing and a deep emotion which is akin to pain but which is not pain. I feel like crying, for culture, for the immensity of humanity, and the tininess of my life, but it is not a crying sad feeling of unpleasantness but an overwhelming surge of emotion, undifferentiated. It is neither sad nor happy, just heavy, voluminous, dense, inside me and engorging me.
I feel so odd being in this world sometimes. I walk through a darkened street and see through the double-pane insulation of a kitchen window, a woman washing dishes. A woman with no background in common with me, to whom I am literally nothing, I do not exist. Right now, as I write this, there are people being beaten to into a coma, people lying in a field of corn watching the crows, making love in a satin-sheeted bed, screaming with pain, ecstasy, seeing their father for the first time in their lives, seeing their father for the last time in their lives, dying, being born, existing on subsistence on the edge of a rain-forest, people traipsing to work through a dusty Mexican street, leading functionaries of totalitarian societies ordering their bedclothes changed, a guerilla warrior on a mattress in a burnt-out building crying bitterly, wrackingly for his past, a nondescript women washing the tomato and onion sauce and pieces of left-over noodles from her Ikea dishes in a German suburb.
The variety of human experience staggers me, almost brings me to a halt sometimes with an outpouring, a shuddering hit, like a cinematic zoom-out.
My life has an ordinariness which is both banal and surprising to me. I am comfortable in my life and although I am not content, this is despite the blessedness of my circumstances. Despite not believing in It, I thank God for the mere fact of my being a being, a perceiving entity, something that it is like to be. I am grateful beyond mere happiness or sadness for my having emotion, for being sometimes overwhelmed, being shuddered from within. I give thanks for the insane privilege of being able to experience walking in a cobbled street after the rain in a bland foreign city.
It is an honour indeed to be an observer of this world.
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