Perhaps libraries
are not a citadel of thought but the ego’s mill, the quern-stone smashing our
spirit. My eyes grow tired, their lids
sinking as the screen’s wanton brightness barrages them. Abating enthusiasm leads me to a sense of
failure; a failure of purpose as nihilistic ruminations meddle, the Visigoths
flowing through the Porta Salaria spilling over Rome’s bricks. I can only wish that I was there, perched
atop a marble ledge, the moon illuminating the scene. Anywhere but here. Suppose I should walk out right now, wander
the streets through the chilled dampness, would that soothe my mind? Yes, perhaps for a few minutes, but they
continue to sack my mind. I try again,
the Sisyphean act of remembrance, the feigned importance in history.
As fingers
strike the keys, the words composed are the embodiment of ego, the immortal textual
soul. Such is the state of writers, a
constant longing for remembering, a frantic outpouring of the self. A life unremembered is a second death, and so
we must face it, even if we waltz under the gaslamps and are happy for a
while. But unless we become the Woolf,
or Faulkner, or Wilde of our day, it is meaningless. I will not affect a life, at least not
significantly. It would only be for a
mere moment and it will continue its course.
This is the dilemma of a writer:
unless you are remembered through the ages, what did you matter to the
world? A plumber has brought more joy
into the world than you have. I can get
by as happily as I was the preceding day if I don’t read even a modicum of art from
nameless writer. I can’t without a
plumber. His knelt frame on the
porcelain tiles ceaselessly fixing the pipes helps the family, and so even as a
small drop in the sea, he has helped the world.
They are the meaningful ones: the plumber, the carpenter, the sailor. The paver rolling
out the hot asphalt through the infinite-horizon buffalo plains allowed a New
York family to cross and rest under the shade of redwoods and hear the birds. The electrician has bestowed light in the
darkness, staving off the night, allowing you and I to sip wine and palaver
past minuit, complaining about women.
But I have done nothing. A
nameless face drowning in an unrelenting horde of faces, not even providing a murmur
that might echo down the halls of infinity.
There is no middle ground: one is
remembered or forgotten. One must rise
above the rest and yell over the ringing tree-tops with their words, else all
is in vain.
But what is
this? I ask as I lift the scrap. Here it is, on top of the computer, at the only
available place to type at on the only open floor of the only
library here. I could have left after I
climbed back up the stairs from the basement and rested my now numb eyes, but
the thought beckoned: I need to write
these thoughts tonight, it’s already overdue.
And I still didn’t write it that night because there it was, the
only fortune cookie message ever pertinent, and to a staggering level. What divine soul left this prodigious sliver
to allay my heart with its caveat?
In
the race to be better or best do not miss the joy of being.
(NOTE: I tried to capture some of the digression of Street Haunting and the preoccupation with futility and death of The Death of the Moth. I know it is very overdue: I apologize. Tuesday night as I was about to finally write this, I really did find this fortune sitting at honestly the only available computer on the entire second floor. It was wonderful and seemed to ask me to reconsider the pessimism I was writing about.)
