Describing moments #1
You’re alone in your room, but’s only 7pm. A daunting four or five hours remain before you can relinquish yourself to your dreams, before you can happily accept the inevitable contents of your unconscious mind, and relish in the lack of responsibility you have over them.
But four or five hours remain, and that block of time is absolutely terrifying.
Just earlier that day, you were at a café, enjoying a book. How purposeful you felt, even for a second, to escape yourself in imagining a world greater than the one you’re living, through the clarity of written words. How motivated you felt, the caffeine kicking in, to also have a grasp on your future, or at least what you want to work towards learning once the school year begins. And, how hopeful you felt for your own human anxieties, reading the promises in Marshall Berman’s book, that
“the modernisms of the past can give us back a sense of our own modern roots, roots that go back two hundred years. They can help us connect our lives with the lives of millions of people who are living through the trauma of modernization thousands of miles away, in societies radically different from our own — and with millions of people who lived through it a century or more ago. They can illuminate the contradictory forces and needs that inspire and torment us: our desire to be rooted in a stable and coherent personal and social past, and our insatiable desire for growth — not merely for economic growth but for growth in experience, in pleasure, in knowledge, in sensibility — growth that destroys both the physical and social landscapes of our past, and our emotional links with those lost worlds: our desperate allegiances to ethnic, national, class and sexual groups which we hope will give us a firm “identity,” and the internalization of everyday life — of our clothes and household goods, our books and music, our ideas an fantasies — that spreads all our identities all over the map; our desire for clear and solid values to live by, and our desire to embrace the limitless possibilities of modern life and experience that obliterate all values; the social and political forces that propel us into explosive conflicts with other people and other peoples, even as we develop a deeper sensitivity and empathy toward our ordained enemies and come to realize, sometimes too late, that they are not so different from us after all. Experiences like these unite us with the nineteenth-century modern world: a world where, as Marx said, ‘everything is pregnant with its contrary’ and ‘all that is solid melts into air’….”
It’s great, your humanity described sounds a lot more seizable than its experienced. And you’ve only gotten through the introduction of the book — you’ve got 350 more full pages (if you’re diligent) before this hope expires, and your life fades into the humdrum of walking back home and staring at the silence of your room.
But in the day, back at the café, you were surrounded by people. Everyone was busy tapping at their computers, chatting with their friends. Life went on as usual — for you, for the bearded man grading papers, for the blonde woman highlighting her book. You even met a friend and shared some confident words and hearty laughter. In that moment, you were sufficiently distracted from the reality of yourself, and it was only when 7pm came that you became starkly aware of it.
And so, you’re here, wondering how to face the next few hours. Perhaps you know what you should do, the rational thing to do. Choices like these are what put your most inspired moments to the test. But you might not want to step up to the plate, you are weak when you feel alone and can’t bear giving up hope in filling that void with the temporary pleasure of feeling connected.
So what can you do — reach for your phone, call a friend? And talk about what? Send a message to someone from your past? Why, for what reason? Maybe you will check social media, and see what random people you don’t care about are up to, because surely that will help.
At this point, you know too well what’s going on with your mind to let yourself fall into comforts.
Nothing is enough, nothing will ever be enough. So maybe you’ll just write a few words to yourself, then go back to your book because really, sometimes that’s all there is for you.
