A celebration of the Hindu new year in Bali where people completely devote the day and themselves to self-reflection.
Nothing is open, lights are turned off, and no one works, travels, talks, or even eats. The Balinese restrict themselves from everything they can in order keep this day.
And tomorrow is ngembak geni, where everyone makes an effort to ask each other for forgiveness.
How idyllic. How idyllic. How idyllic.
I’m hungry.
WANT.
Why is everything never not enough?
Must I be reminded of simplicity everyday?
(Obvious answers are “I don’t know” and “yes.”)
Stripped and bare:
L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
-Le Petit Prince
Joseph: you’re gorgeous when you blush. like a wild flower.
Georgette: [shaking head] it’s my dyspepsia.
-Amelie
Sometimes it’s like this. Where ailments morph into delusions and perception becomes reality. Or, the other way around and around. Today, especially.
Self-diagnosed hypochondriac with a mean, mean cold. Symptoms include brain leakage and interruptuping cow-coughs. Remedies such as water bottle nasal irrigation, snail shaped humidifers, and overdosages of diphenhydramine may assist in easing symptoms however you should ask your doctor for a golden neti pot with a rainbow coming out of it if symptoms persist.
Put together this optimistically long list of resolutions but scrapped them all and decided on the following:
Be honest and sincere. Trust and commit.
That is all. That is everything.
Alvy as young boy sits on a sofa with his mother in an old-fashioned, cluttered doctor’s office. The doctor stands near the sofa, holding a cigarette and listening.
MOTHER
(to the doctor)
He’s been depressed.
All off a sudden,
he can’t do anything.
DOCTOR
(nodding)
Why are you depressed, Alvy?
MOTHER
(nudging Alvy)
Tell Dr. Flicker.
(Young Alvy sits, his head down
His mother answers for him)
It’s something he read.
DOCTOR
(Puffing on his cigarette and nodding)
Something he read, huh?
ALVY
(His head still down)
The universe is expanding.
DOCTOR
The universe is expanding?
ALVY
(Looking up at the doctor)
Well, the universe is everything, and if
It’s expanding, someday it will break apart
and that would be the end of everything!
Disgusted, his mother looks at him.
MOTHER
(shouting)
What is that your business?
(She turns back to the doctor)
He stopped doing his homework.
ALVY
What’s the point?
MOTHER
(Excited, gesturing with her hands)
What has the universe got to do with it?
You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not
expanding!
DOCTOR
(Heartily, looking down at Alvy)
It won’t be expanding for billions of years
yet, Alvy. And we’ve gotta try to enjoy
ourselves while we’re here. uh?
He laughs.
-Annie Hall
Philly is for fatties, Atlantic City is for losers, bus rides are for lovers, and Mitsuwa is for me. Weekend revelations of past lives and future promises lead to one conclusion: it’s all relative.
Je dois dire, la brise ouvre le monde, n’est pas?
“Everything takes forever”
“Right. To know exactly what you want to be doing, to know exactly what you’d make, given the means, given sometimes, all the projects lined up, the body of work, have it all mapped out– who will be involved, what the office will look like, where to desks will go, couches, hot tub…”
“It should be easier”
“It should be automatic”
“Instantaneous”
-Eggers
“That’s very philosophical.”
“Yes. When all else fails, philosophize.”
-
Evening falls. they are not hungry, but they eat. Eating is a ritual, and rituals make things easier.
-
All at once he has become a recluse, a country recluse. the end of roving. Though the heart be still as loving and the moon be still as bright. Who would have thought it would come to an end so soon and so suddenly: the roving, the loving!
-
He is not, he hopes, a sentimentalist. [...] he avoids saying to her, ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ in order not to have to hear her say in return, ‘someone has to do it.’
-
He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it. This is what he is becoming: stupid, daft, wrongheaded.
-
She rests her head on her arms; her shoulders heave as she gives in. Again the feeling washed over him: listlessness, indifference, but also weightlessness, as if he has been eaten away from inside and only the eroded shell of his heart remains. How, he thinks to himself, can a man in this state find words, find music that will bring back the dead?
-Coetzee
Calmly he explains it all in the only way he knows how, like a science teacher, that it’s like intertia. That the unbearable processes and procedures of life will only stay exactly the same unless something is done about it.
He then looks up, blink, blink, blinks several times and stares directly into her eyes with a child-like innocence. She looks for the trace of a tear that could almost be there and it’s the most painful thing ever felt. Sincerity.
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To understand. To never look away. and never, never to forget.”
-Arundhati Roy
“Let me tell you the story of “right hand, left hand.” It’s a tale of good and evil. Hate: it was with this hand that cane iced his brother. Love: these five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: static. one hand is always fighting the other hand; and the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand, love, is finished. but, hold on, stop the presses, the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes, now, that’s right. Ooh, it’s the devastating right and hate is hurt, he’s down. Left-hand hate K.O.ed by love.”
-Radio Raheem spits some truth
Do the right thing. Do it.
“Romance gives intriguing hints of transcendence. I am “possessed” by the one I love. I think of her day and night, languish when she leaves me, perform brave deeds to impress her, revel in her attention, live for her, even die for her. I want to be both heroic and meek at the same time. for a time, and only for a time, I can live on that edge of exaltation. Then reality sets in, or boredom, betrayal, old age, or death. At least, though, I can see in it a glimpse of God’s infinite capacity for such attention. Could this be how God views us?
Charles Williams, a colleague and close friend of C. S. lewis, wrote that romantic love gives us a new vision of one other human being, an insight into his or her “eternal identity.” For a brief time, at least, romance gives us the ability to see the best in one other person, to ignore or forgive flaws, to bask in endless fascination. That state, said williams, gives a foretaste of how we will one day view every resurrected person, and how God now views us. Romantic love does not distort vision but corrects it, in a very narrow range. The Bible uses explicit romantic images to describe God’s love for us: what we feel in passing for one person, God feels eternally for the many.”
- P. Yancey
