It’s now official: I’m trying out for Marigold. If, after the audition, they want to take me and I decide that I want to join, I’m going to have leave Spain indefinitely. I’ll move back in with my parents in New Jersey.
It’s partly a wonderful situation. It’s partly an awful situation. There’s no doubt about the fact that what I’m doing is selfish. We can try to use another term to indicate it’s a form of selfishness we all have and perhaps even need to encourage, but it’s selfish none the less. I’m looking out for my own interests.
And that’s a remarkable thing to consider since I would have so hated anyone who would do something like that once. But my attitude on so many things keeps getting more embracing of necessity. I’m happier than I was as a teenager and a young man for a simple reason: I’m less opposed to the existence of evil — or at least those things that could be labelled evil and stem from the same sources of character from which so much that is evil comes. I find myself less repulsed by people because I’ve done more wrong things myself and can’t blame people with sincerity anymore.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with Fox in March or April last year before I moved to Poughkeepsie. It was a conversation about trust and those words “trust no one” of his. And I said that what I wanted was a world where there was someone to trust. And Fox said the first thing that truly was a defeat for me — but later a liberation. While everyone else had just focused on relaxing and giving selfish reasons — using reason as a tranquilizer –, Fox instead said that you just can’t trust people and when I complained he said the wisest thing of all: “haven’t you ever lied? Haven’t you deceived people? Haven’t you abandoned people?” And that was what I needed to hear to change my attitude. Because what he said was right: nothing lasts forever and that is just “the weakness of flesh”.
As I get older, I reconcile myself more and more to the absence of eternity in our lives. It is perhaps the most difficult thing for me to accept given that I have felt it necessary to fight against the maddening ephemerality of all things in our culture since I was a boy.
A good friend in college was a brilliant and driven mathematician and had many similarities with me. He was that sort of person so similar to me that I focused on the differences and could really get to understand them because we shared enough to spend hours talking every day. One thing he said that struck me was that he had once wanted to be a pianist (and given his ability to focus and work, I imagine he had been a very good pianist), but that he ultimately decided the work you do as an artist doesn’t last forever. And it was a line of reasoning I knew and had felt and yet there was no way around it: I could not leave music just because it would not lost one day.
I tried once. The result was that I gave away nearly my entire CD collection and all of the CD’s are now in a garbage heap somewhere. It was a piece of idiocy in retrospect. At the same time, it was one of those marks of excess force that I think define the lives of those who will do a great deal with their time on Earth. Humans are disposed to inertia: without this absurd excess of energy and resolve, we may not be able to accomplish anything. Sickness and greatness may be inseparable in humans.
And I feel the same way about love. Love, quite possibly, cannot last forever. Quite possibly the force of romantic love cannot even last a lifetime.
You cannot truly guarantee anything. Marriage is not a guarantee of eternal love. We are not capable of guaranteeing what we cannot control. We control our actions and not our feelings — and scarcely control the actions.
But, in spite of that, we have to give our all. And I have always done that. Despite the seeming madness of it to others, despite the over-emotionality others have condemned, despite the excess, the sturm und drang of it all, I have given my all with everything. I have always treated everything I did as if it might last forever. I have never given it a predefined end from the start. From the first day, I have given my all.
That, though, is the source of my regrets since others get caught up in it and expect forever and I so often fail to provide it.
Still, it is better. Of all the things I have seen lately that stopped those who should be beautiful people, it has been fear. When I was younger, the vices were more repellent and simpler. I don’t even get involved with those people any longer. Now the only issue is fear. I meet people who need time to feel comfortable with a thing before they can feel it to be permanent and to begin to give their all. This seems like nothing more than confusion and an absence of knowledge of how life works. And, to quote something I said before, it seems like a crime against the present.
It gets so complicated if you live enough.
You turn into what you hated.1
- Further Seems Forever : Hide Nothing : Light Up Ahead↩