Limit As H Approaches The Future
To: haiyan
From: bryan[...]
After reading the latest post on your site, which I identified very strongly with, I'm going to paste you a little paragraph from Calvino's On a Winter's Night a Traveller... I know that in two months I am starting a new phase of my life in a new city, but it seems out there like the limits I'm describing in calculus each day. It's a familiar feeling, one that I encounter with any change looming in my future. A packing up of my belongings and memories alike, each and every attended special care before being hastily stowed for later retrieval. I am already forgetting the ways and paths through Providence; each day I spend in CA is another swath of the city's map blurring from precise detail to rough ink spot. Each step towards my new apartment-- plates purchased, moving arrangements made-- seem like gifts or favors for someone else. In times of impending change my life tends to feel like a string of impossibilities until the last possible moment when all of those collected impossibilities become a single inevitable and that 'future' becomes the present.
All places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isloation is delt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place. I, in fact, find myself here without a here or an elsewhere, recognized as an outsider by the nonoutsiders and envy them. Yes, envy. I am looking from the outside at the life of an ordinary evening in an ordinary little city, and I realize I am cut off from ordinary evenings for god knows how long, and I think of thousands of little cities like this, of hundereds of thousands of lighted places where at this hour people allow the evening's darkness to descend and have none of the thoughts in their head that I have in mine; maybe they have other thoughts that aren't at all enviable, but at this moment I would be willing to trade with any of them. p. 17best,
-bryan
--Posted 07/13/04 04:55AM