*
There is a loneliness in being human. One is so much a social being, yet at the end of the day, one is very much alone in oneself. This loneliness also transcends to this cosmic loneliness, on this seeming scene of the universe and lone humanity. It is not about physical loneliness, it is the wavelength loneliness at times. You seem to traverse a wavelength and hope to find another soul on that wavelength. Sometimes one finds it in books, in authors, in long past writers. In that way, books are a beautiful tech to meet people on your own wavelength.
This loneliness is not pressing. There's plenty of company and fellow feeling and shared joys and shared lives. It is about a deeper question to the universe, it is about the hungry wonder of being, the unknowables surrounding us, and in this macrocosm, a little microcosm of us, playing along, living our lives, living our days on this Earth.
Perhaps it is a mood that envelops one. Perhaps it is the keenness to express something in words, perhaps it is about personal aspiration to be able to express well what is really on mind.
The only solace is it all passes. The flow of life keeps moving forward. So sometimes even if you are stuck at some aspect of life, life kindly carries you forward. Between the self command of 'keep moving forward', and the nature of things that they pass, one keeps walking on virgin sands of time. New footsteps which soon get washed over. There's nothing to hold on to, nothing to show except in oneself, in one's becoming and being. And that too passes. It matters not at the end of the day however burning those questions and wonders may be. Time and life dull every sharp edge, everything gets blunted like smooth river stones in this churning river of time.
*
Little to do with the book. More to do with the idea of books and being able to sometimes either find other souls on the same wavelength as yours, or sometimes being gently led on the writer's prose to a completely new wavelength.
There are certain writings that are meditative. One can
unfold oneself on those sentences and glide along wherever the author takes
you. Sometimes these might be about the most inconsequential of things, but a
personal, perhaps an individual's personal and vulnerable take on things. Not
seeming as such, but as such. I have been reading Agua Viva by Clarice
Lispector. I got nudged along to Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. And I think of
Pessoa. I think of Knausgaard. I think of meditative long sentences. Even Proust
and to an extent Murnane on reading and writing. For that matter, unedited
prose of many writers when they talk about reading and writing. There's a sort
of quiet meditative movement to the prose, which calms you down, soothes you
like a baby on bottle. Not the prettiest of analogies, but words folded in a
particular way can have as calming a power - in the same instance folding you
warmly in the general you and I, and in the same instance letting you stand
alone as a very unique I, forgetting and not forgetting, murmuring sweet
nothings, almost inconsequntial things, just some words, connecting you warmly
to life.
The simple idea is reading and writing and perhaps
meditative prose. Soul Mountain (still very early
pages) seems like one. Perhaps there are certain moods where the mind feeds on
the description of simple everyday life but at a removed context so the
everyday world is itself an enchanted world. For such moods. Or perhaps it is
the tranquil world view of the writer that affects us. It must be something
like that, where between the lines, something of the writer's spirit, his
worldview, gets transmitted to the reader. And although what one reads about
maybe relatively simple, the words have done their work as a net for the
spirit, for the world-view of the writer to be transmitted to you. Perhaps it
is that, that we enjoy in such meditative prose.
*
I have different reading moods. For all moods, secure, not so secure, Eastern wisdom. There's a stillness, enough-ness, a sort of simple joy in simple being without any major clamor or want or need or have not or some sort of perpetual competition that the Western world view has at times. I think of Soul Mountain. Clouds on the hill. Basho and his travels. I have read little that way, but I think Europe too finds its tranquility but mostly somehow there's melancholy and it leans towards the absurdity of life,a heaviness. But somehow when one regards life in the Eastern way which is generally about the whole, reading the Western works is like going down a level where one still grapples with parts. Just sometimes.
Even that understanding of the whole is lived, not expressed. One sees a glimmer of it in Eastern simplicity and thoughts, but like chimera it escapes in the Westernization of our lives. Still, there's hope. Hopefully at least to keep arriving at new meditative ways of understanding the world, and yet another way of seeing it.
