6:06 am in Toulouse, France on June 3rd 2013. In
an hour the Carrefour will be open, and then I will have food and toilet paper,
two crucial and currently absent ingredients of life. Yesterday, deeply
saddened because the entire city was closed out of respect for the Sabbath or
respect for relaxation, I began to fall apart at around 6 pm. I watched Closer in an effort to occupy my mind
without using it, and this had some mild success. At 7:20 the program that
played the movie crashed completely and depressed me even more. The problems
that I have with this computer are ill-timed and overwhelming. I feel that I
should be entirely capable of defeating them and yet feel powerless against
them.
Excuse the tone of Weltschmertz, I’ve been reading This Side of Paradise since 4:45 this
morning and it’s impossible not to absorb some of it. That was a primary
concern as I began the book, noting that the only qualities that the
protagonist and I shared were ones that caused me a great deal of trouble and
eroded the more respectable parts of me. I’ve said myself that one should read
things one disagrees with, however, and this book is an exercise in that.
Amory’s triumphs are failures, and his failures triumphs in my mind. The danger
of reading a disagreeable thing that is well written is that it is too easily
absorbed. I love to read poorly written ideas that I disagree with, because I
have no trouble rejecting them.
On the other hand, as long as the offending ideas remain
small and easily codified in the midst of poetry they can still be useful. I
found this in The Bluest Eye which
gave far too much pity to rapists. This excess of pity served to solidify my
own hatred of them by deciding that their compassion could come from other sources
and I was free to detest them completely. This is also false, but I do love
extremes and I will feel it until some other case makes it impossible.
It’s nice that I
never have to express this twist to my philosophy, because it seems
disingenuous. I frequently allow myself to believe things that are wrong, in
such a way that can be changed whenever necessary. That’s not really belief
then, is it? It’s just filling in a blank where belief ought to be.
Freewriting is magnificently dangerous; I don’t know why I
allow myself to indulge. It makes me wish I was one of the slow and studied
people like Edith, who don’t allow their unguided mind to make them who they
are. My brand of meditation is equally messy. I become whoever I am with no
thought of whether I want to be that person, and even smaller consideration of
whether that person is in any way “good.”
Who I am is not something latently outside of my control,
but I allow it to be because… well, who knows. Laziness, pleasure in surprises,
no impetus to do better; could be anything. Perhaps because I have faith that I am already
what I want to be and all that is left is to discover her. That’s a little
kinder.
Here I am very different from Amory Blaine, and yet by
reading a book about him I could easily become him. What an unnatural paradox;
I must have made a mistake somewhere. The hours between 12:20 and 4:45 are a
dozy mess and I blame them for my strangeness this morning.
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