Dans Paris

Paul: I think we grossly underestimate our sorrows, in general. We always die of sadness, actually. Alice: You mean sadness is put inside us at birth?

Paul: Yes.

Alice: Like eye color?

Paul: Exactly. That’s why it needs our care, but others can do nothing. No one can do anything about eye color. Also, I think it would be fair to let you take care of your sorrow alone.

Paul: I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t trust myself when I’m in love. I get nervous and say the wrong things or I start examining, evaluating, calculating what I say. I say “Think it will rain?” She responds, “I don’t know.” Then I wonder if she’s even interested. It all scares me to death. Yes, scared to death. A friend once told me having a fuck buddy is better than falling in love. I think he’s right. Rain makes flowers grow and snails happy. That’s a fact. But if a girl loves me she starts acting strangely, like asking me funny questions and pouting when I snap at her or saying things like “Think it will rain?” and I say “I have no idea” and she says “Oh” and gets all sad looking up at the California-blue sky. That makes me thank god it’s you, darling. This time it’s your turn.

Anna: I know you love me. That’s the difference between us.

Paul: How can you know I love you? How can you be sure?

Anna: Before I followed you inside this hole, I lulled myself to sleep repeating “Paul loves me.” I said it out loud hundreds of times, like a prayer. Meaningless words. We hardly knew each other. But something came about, something established. I believed you loved me. I had faith in your love. This belief never left me. We can pray to be loved by only one person. It’s not the worst way to save a soul. You never prayed for my love. You never needed my love.

Paul: I think we grossly underestimate our sorrows, in general. We always die of sadness, actually. Alice: You mean sadness is put inside us at birth?

Paul: Yes.

Alice: Like eye color?

Paul: Exactly. That’s why it needs our care, but others can do nothing. No one can do anything about eye color. Also, I think it would be fair to let you take care of your sorrow alone.

___________

Paul: I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t trust myself when I’m in love. I get nervous and say the wrong things or I start examining, evaluating, calculating what I say. I say “Think it will rain?” She responds, “I don’t know.” Then I wonder if she’s even interested. It all scares me to death. Yes, scared to death. A friend once told me having a fuck buddy is better than falling in love. I think he’s right. Rain makes flowers grow and snails happy. That’s a fact. But if a girl loves me she starts acting strangely, like asking me funny questions and pouting when I snap at her or saying things like “Think it will rain?” and I say “I have no idea” and she says “Oh” and gets all sad looking up at the California-blue sky. That makes me thank god it’s you, darling. This time it’s your turn.

____________

Anna: I know you love me. That’s the difference between us.

Paul: How can you know I love you? How can you be sure?

Anna: Before I followed you inside this hole, I lulled myself to sleep repeating “Paul loves me.” I said it out loud hundreds of times, like a prayer. Meaningless words. We hardly knew each other. But something came about, something established. I believed you loved me. I had faith in your love. This belief never left me. We can pray to be loved by only one person. It’s not the worst way to save a soul. You never prayed for my love. You never needed my love.

a sinner or a saint

Routine

She’s out there.

He’s out there.

They sit at restaurants, have lonely meals, read magazines while having a temaki for dinner.
They ask for diet coke with ice, no lime please. They lick the yogurt lid. Sleep with old t-shirts. They hate wearing socks to bed, unless it’s too cold not to wear them.

They like going to the movies by themselves. Hate watching plays. Never care for television. Like going to small gigs and listening to music with their eyes closed.

They love, absolutely love traveling. Despise being tourists – they call themselves “travelers”. They dream of going to Japan, Botswana, Pensacola. Just because they like the name. Pensacola.

They write since they were kids, diaries, stories, poems, lyrics. Never show anyone. But they have blogs and tumblrs and twitters and flickrs and blips and memes. They like to watch videos on vimeo, listen to new bands on myspace and read about technology and education and astrology and random wikipedia stuff. They love their friend’s shared items in google reader.

They both think things used to have a better design in the past and fantasize about being born in Paris in the 19th century or maybe being teenagers in London in the 60s. Or painters from the 15th century.

They both have been in way too many serious relationships and like being sincere about their feelings and calling when they want to call and not calling when they don’t want to. They enjoy witty sms exchange and quotable gtalk chats. Unexpected e-mails are the favourite ones.

Once she was coming back from a party and stopped at MacDonald’s, 4am, to buy some ice-cream.

He was sitting there with some friends, having a Cheddar McMelt.

That was the only opportunity they ever had to meet each other. She even glanced at him, at his cute round glasses and messy hair and thought he was kinda attractive. But then she left. He didn’t even see her. They were never in the same spot again.

Foi apenas um sonho

John Givings: You want to play house you got to have a job. You want to play nice house, very sweet house, you got to have a job you don’t like.
——
John Givings: Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
——
April Wheeler: Tell me the truth, Frank, remember that? We used to live by it. And you know what’s so good about the truth? Everyone knows what it is however long they’ve lived without it. No one forgets the truth, Frank, they just get better at lying.
——
April Wheeler: Look at us. We’re just like everyone else. We’ve bought into the same, ridiculous delusion.
——
Frank Wheeler: I want to feel things. Really feel them.

This is London

This is London
This is underground
This is a Metropolitan line train to Uxbridge.
This is London
And the bluish green Heinz baked beans’ cans
Tuna and cucumber sandwiches
And BLT
And DLR
And the chewing gum noses on the posters hanging on the escalator walls.
This is London
And these are Polish guys drinking Kronenbourg from a can and talking loudly
Indecipherable.
This is London
These are wet streets shining under gas lamps and the faint stars and their shadows.
This is London
This is Baker Street
This is Sherlock Holmes on the tiles
Abbey Road and the Beatles.
This is London
The Queen and Tate Modern
Tattoos and piercings
And Victorian headpieces.
This is London
These are Indians
And they took over every cornershop in the country
And there are loads of them.
This is London
The Underground papers
Quite mainstream, in fact:
Metro for the mornings
Lite and Londonpaper for the rush hour
Left on the seats amongst McDonald’s papercups and fried chicken paperbags.
Yes, yes
This is London
No one speaks English without an accent
And kids look cool in Shoreditch, Brick Lane, Old Street
They read magazines and pretend not to care
But they follow the book
And the American Apparel meets flappers is the general look
- but no one dances the Charleston.
´Cause this is London
And these are the years 2000’s
And everyone’s got an iPod, a Facebook, a taste for alcohol
And everyone is drunk before eleven on a Friday night.
This is London
And the guys in the City try to copy East London haircuts
- but they make real money, shag real secretaries, while the boys from Hackney are skint and only shag the high-waisted-skirts-for-a-secretary-look indie girls when they get lucky at the Old Blue Last, every once in a while.
This is London
This is a pub
We serve food all day
Never mind the mice, though
- pint of Stella, pint of Star
We drink fast so it doesn’t get warm.
And the rugby supporters shouting on the train back home
“Well, shut up, will ya, please? We are tired, Yeah.”
This is London
And tourists.
Lots of tourists.
Asian girls photographing at Trafalgar Square
And the lions.
Tourists, tourists.
The magnificent National Gallery, the school excursions from France
And the pre-theatre dinner
The Phantom of the Opera is not dead.
This is London
And it’s old
And it’s new
And it’s beautiful
And I love it to bits.
This is cold, and damp,
and dark, and windy
And everyone loves to complain about the weather
So much so that, if it was nice and warm all year round, people would be so bored not to have something to complain about they would start hating the very Sun.
This is London
And there is a little sign everywhere for everything:
Mind the gap, please,
Sorry, this toilette is out of service
Please, keep feet off seats
Please offer this seat to elderly or disabled people
Please, keep to your right
Please, mind the step
Always so polite?
This is absolutely London
Celebrity gossip, football, Channel 4, BBC
Poppy appeal
Hay fever
Charity
Party
Tube
Anything.
This is London
This is where you come to find something
Anything
No matter what
And always end up finding it.
Exactly what you were looking for.

- February, 2008.

homework.

Diary

Is it possible to ever feel it again?

“At its best? It feels like joy. Like standing in the presence of God and knowing you are loved without reservation. It feels the way you haven’t felt since you were a small child, absolutely alive, absolutely in the moment, able to feel and experience and share with others without fear or hesitation. It is the most perfect moment of the most perfect day of your life, when trouble was nothing but a memory and the possibilities rolled on forever. It is the achievement of the inner peace the religions try to sell but rarely deliver.”

Lesson to be learned

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.

(…)

… someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.

This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle; the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

And one more thing: don’t think that the great love which was once granted to you, when you were a boy, has been lost; how can you know whether vast and generous wishes didn’t ripen in you at that time, and purposes by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains so strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.

- Rainer Maria Rilke