Flashes

I find myself still thinking of The Life of Chuck which had a mind-bending effect on me, similar to what Robert Sapolsky  had.  In his book   Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will , Sapolsky claims that any choice we make is the only one we can make in any situation and depends on our genes , culture, education, our experiences, everything that happened to our ancestors all the way down the line, the current environment, and the situation in question. Sapolsky proves by neurological tests that our brains already make the choices before we make them. The thought of not having free will is frightening to many but for me it was liberating. I became aware of the huge responsibility of my actions and how they affect other people because for the people with whom I interact, I am part of their environment and their experience of life. It made me appreciate these encounters and decide to try to be actively constructive in them.  It may be that The Life of Chuck ...

Because of the volatility of the world, I decided to leave The Book of Disquiet for the moment to hopefully return to it later. For now, I define it as an emotional bible that you can open at random and what you'll read may well resonate with what is happening inside you. Instead, I watched  The Life of Chuck . It is the most existentialist movie I have seen. Thank you, Stephen King and Mike Flanagan . You beautifully verbalized and visualized something that everyone wonders and will experience.

Before starting with Pessoa , I read Martin Page 's How I Became Stupid , being delighted by its beginning and getting more and more disappointed during its progress. (Despite his English sounding name, Page is French.) The book is about a young intellectual man doing a boring office job and suffering from existential angst . He tries to find a way out of the latter by studying options like alcoholism and suicide with the help of "experts." To not spoil the book too much, I only reveal that he decides to drop these options and after certain turns finds himself working in investing , the lucrative side effects of which seem to bury his sensitivity.  Pessoa's book starts in a similar way. There is a man working in an office and suffering from deep existential angst. But he has no way out of it nor does he even look for it. Instead, he verbalizes his emotions in depths like no other. It lacks all the entertaining elements that Page's book has and just takes you deepe...

I am still thinking of Pessoa 's ability to absorb the present and express what happens both outside and inside his mind so accurately.  For finding my way back to the present, I went to a board walk by the ocean and sat on a bench. I looked at the ocean and its foamy waves hitting the seashore. (While doing a New York Times crossword I learned this foam is called " surf ".) The waves were unusually beautiful, deep green and white, and changed in horizontal waves in a way I had not seen before or just not noticed. The foamy rows were high and reminded me of a painting where they turn into horses. I observed the sand. I looked at a couple with two dogs on the beach in distance. They were standing by the river the winter rains coming from the land and the ocean together form to the beach, preventing me from getting to the other side. Once I did so and all of a sudden a rogue wave from the ocean came and almost took me. The Atlantic is sneaky. The dogs were running happil...

I am reading Fernando Pessoa 's The Book of Disquiet . It is edited from the 25,000 pages he wrote during the 1920s and 1930s, found in a trunk after his death in 1935.  Pessoa had many alter egos ; this book is credited to one of them, Bernard Soares , a book-keeper working in Lisbon , at Rua dos Douradores . For the first time in my life, I am urged to underline sentences in a book that is not a text book, to find them again and again. A hundred years later, they go under my skin, they express emotions I did not know I had. " Brief, dark shadow of a city tree, the light sound of water falling into a sad pool, the green of smooth grass – a public garden on the edge of dusk – in this moment you are the whole universe to me, because you entirely fill my every conscious feeling. I want nothing more from life than to feel it ebbing away into these unexpected evenings to the sound of other people’s children playing in gardens fenced in by the melancholy of the surrounding s...

 When I think of  the biography  of Franz Kafka  I only remember  How he rowed his boat  up the Vltava  Then put the oars up  Lay down on his back  At the bottom of the boat  And let the river take him  In his black suit  He looked like a  Dead man in his coffin  When his colleagues  on the bridge  Watched him float  Towards them  And past under them.