My life is full of half-formed ideas and mothballed projects. Far from being a self-pitying lament, this is a grateful realization. For in discovering who I am, by means of observation rather than vain wish, I can devote myself to it wholeheartedly, to the general benefit.
Sometimes I’m a conscious exile from the Forties and Fifties. The past is a spacious realm, an Eden from which we have all been thrown out, with no return allowed; unless we can do it with the magic of Art. For in a sense I am there, my homesickness and loyalty granting me honorary residence in a place which is no more. Those decades repeat in my head with a plangent refrain, like a song which stays in the head for days, as if it has a message to convey; so that the song, in all its phrasing and orchestration, the uniqueness of its voice, becomes part of one’s own essence, newly understood, touching more deeply the inner chords which lay long-forgotten; a harp once lost, now discovered in a dusty attic, its strings still perfectly tuned, quivering silently with longing to sound again. It doesn’t make me hate the present, for 2010 has not cremated the past, there is always something remaining which hasn’t changed. I wince when someone tramples on “my” past, replacing the still-serviceable with newfangledness for no other purpose than to assert a younger generation’s creativity. I make my secret resolve to stick to old ways, ideas and words, even if they are no longer understood; even if they are condemned for being unfashionable or “unacceptable”. Fortunately Nature hasn’t changed. This biting wind on my face, this penetrating cold is the same as when I was twelve, and so I embrace it as a friend.
I don’t worry about the future of the world. I’m guilt-free. I have no plans for the future, anyway, though I’m part of a society driven by plans and hopes and dread of ecological Armageddon. I hear a Sunday morning preacher, a Church of England clergyman, of all people (whom I had looked to as an upholder of traditions) urging even more change, as if there were not already a surfeit of ill-considered change. Our only future is to die! Any churchman preaching utopia is surely a heretic. I speak as the gladiators of old to their Emperor: Nos morituri te salutamus; we who are about to die salute you, everyone cedes to a surviving generation. I shall pay my dues to the living and those who survive me, and in my spare time prepare to die gracefully, to depart with no regrets. Of death itself, what it is, what it means to die, we the living are ignorant. As Nature abhors a vacuum, so ignorance breeds beliefs. So I do not speak of death. I’ll be more precise, and speak of mortality, the most certain thing we know.
I’m not in denial of death, for it’s no enemy of mine. I’m preparing for it, as slowly as possible. What I’m in denial of is the last fifty years. I don’t feel obliged to embrace the twenty-first century, for I’ve brought along enough memories of the mid-twentieth to keep me going.
It’s not long since I cherished the ambition to be an author of hard-backed literature, perhaps published by Faber & Faber, but that pretension melted like snow three days after I wrote to a literary agent requesting representation. I didn’t wait for a reply, or perhaps I received it by telepathy. So I fell back on the project of translating a philosophical work by Albert Camus. Observing myself, a practice I recommend to all, I see that the project fails to excite me: I haven’t translated another line in weeks. I’ve toyed with philosophy, but the kind represented by Heidegger, Jaspers and so on isn’t for me. Heidegger asks “What is Being?”, “What is Time?”, “What is Art?” and so on. Jasper asks “What is Existence?” Well they are just words, and they mean what people mean when they pronounce them, no more no less. We don’t need philosophers to tell us.
It’s the great virtue of the blog as a form of literature that it can embrace the half-formed idea and the mothballed project, for a day or even more. In my blog I can feel, without having to say or define, what Being is, what Time is. In today’s virtual world, a blog is composed of little more than Time, being otherwise insubstantial, consuming neither paper nor ink, only the attention of Beings—writer and reader. It may or may not be Art, but nobody is obliged to judge. A blog is modest in its pretension and yet you and I can invest these places, these alcoves of attention (so difficult to explain to anyone from an earlier generation) with our highest aspirations.
I shall stay within my own league, and maybe pick up my book project later, to clean it up for someone to read when I’m gone.
PS The illustration shows possibly the most delightful book I’ve ever read. In my local, The Falcon, there are alcoves housing shelves of old books. Dining there recently, I picked one at random and started to read. I “couldn’t put it down”, so had to face a moral dilemma, since it’s a pub, not a lending library, and I’m not a thief. I thought I might come in daily to read a few pages, at the cost of a pint a time, but took K’s wiser counsel and bought this handsome volume second-hand, possibly the classiest show-biz biography ever written, the tale of the three Korda brothers, Alex, Zoltan and Vincent; Hungarian emigrés who triple-handedly established the British film industry as a credible alternative to Hollywood. Published by Allen Lane (hard-back Penguin): almost as classy as Faber, methinks. The author, Michael Korda (Vincent’s nephew) shows us heights of memoir-writing skill I could never hope to reach.
a wayfarer’s notes 
“I don’t worry about the future of the world. I’m guilt-free.” Reminds me of John Sturrock’s criticism of Existentialism: ”Existentialism, with its invocations of a universe that is cruelly ‘indifferent’ to human hopes and suffering, was the timely, if now dated, answer. ”Sturrock paraphrases Alain Robbet-Grillet on the existentialists: “if the universe is an alien place in which to exist, so be it; complaining won’t make it any less so.”
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I wonder if what those existentialists had in common was suffering the pain and humiliation of the Nazi occupation in WW2. After a decade (the Thirties) in which they saw the Depression and the rise of Fascism. Sartre was a member of the Communist Party & supporter of the USSR for a while. It’s not easy unless we immerse ourselves in those days via literature to empathise with how they saw things. Certainly they would have condemned the statement of mine that you quote above!
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Yes, and it is interesting that a Hindu would probably not, seeing the future as always another revolution of the past. Just another kalpa, exactly like the last one. Dear mother Kali, giver and taker of our life, and that of our world as a whole. Nothing to fret about, she takes care of our every need. Perhaps our worries are immodest pretensions. Eat, drink and be merry, advises Ecclesiastes.
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I think there is a wonderful freedom in being comfortable with a life of ‘half-formed ideas and mothballed projects.’ Most crucial – it implies a life of creativity and thinking. There is a certain disciplined emptiness in being able to limit ones’ enthusiasms and wall off the world so as to proclaim oneself the author of fully formed ideas and completed projects…. for in that version, there are so many ideas unthought, so many projects unexplored!Personally, I’m comfortable with being able to dream more and bigger than I can possibly act to complete – there is a roving mind in that, a willingness to attend to life’s puzzles and attempt to solve them. Otherwise one must ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, stop asking ‘why’ and that would – for me – be a sad place to be. Yet many – perhaps most – people are happy not to notice that the world is filled with puzzles and undiscovered answers.
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A beautiful post Vincent! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It is not death and mortality that I find Morbid. That is something inevitable and if one believes in reincarnation then one may find the prospect of a new set of experiences after death, in a new life exciting. I do. The reference to morbidity was to suicide in your earlier post, the causing of death by an intentional act. I am glad you have given up that project atleast for now. It is a coincidence that you mentioned about the past. I too my early life and recently I was coming to the conclusion that what had happened from the age of five to now has little meaning or relevance and that very young age was the one with most meaning to me in this life.
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As your literary hero said: “the mystery of things is within the very things themselves for, in being things, they know nothing about mysteries” I translated another poem by Pessoa and posted it in my page.
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It’s a lovely translation, Luciana! I shall comment later at your place.
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Thanks Ashok. Just to clarify, it wasn’t my suicide project of course, just the translation of a book with an ultimately life-affirming message. I think Camus’ analysis of suicide in his first chapter is a way to express his rejection of Hope, which his intellect characterises as an evasion. I have to say again, these are his views, not mine!
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Hayden, I often compare my life with yours and see how you’ve placed yourself in a position which demands that you finish what you started. That’s in my life too but on a very much smaller scale, and not so much the subject of my posts. But these are differences appropriate to our different ages, you being in a stage of building things up and me deciding (in this very post!)not to launch any major new things. With the opportunity to change my mind tomorrow of course.
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Was it actually Ecclesiastes who said “Eat, drink and be merry”, Raymond? I shall read his story properly, and see what he has to say.
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Here are some good ones, I think, from good old E: 12 I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! 14 I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. 15 What is crooked cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted. 16 I said to myself, “Look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” 17 Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. 18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++15 Then I said to myself, “The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise?” I said to myself, “This too is meaningless.”16 For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered; the days have already come when both have been forgotten. Like the fool, the wise too must die! ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Let’s go to the pub: E:” 24 A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil”
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Very well quoted Raymond. These are some of my favorite quotations from EC. I have taken this to imply as a warning to persons who accumulate a lot of wealth, that it all must be left behind but it is good to eat, drink and be merry because that is the only portion of the labor that stays with the soul. There are other verses as regards drinking – Consume wine if with a heavy heart but give strong drinks to persons who wish to destroy themselves. Therefore the drink bit is probably with reference to wine (perhaps also beer) but not gin, whiskey or rum.
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I agree ashok. He also seems to be questioning that idea that wisdom will allow us to escape our existential situation. I think wisdom takes us to the heart of our existential position, not out of it. There at the center of the problem, we can explore and enjoy the richness of it.
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If I compared a certain aspect of you to Mark Twain, would you feel you had been denounced as similar to a base American?
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To John: you are being as mysterious as your name suggests. Referring to “a certain aspect”” makes your question too oblique for me to answer! And your reference to Mark Twain makes me realize I don’t know enough about him to feel denounced or not. And when you said “base American” I had to check my post, a little guiltily, to see if I had denounced Americans myself, either the whole population or any particular ones. But more importantly than any of the above, I visited your site and am delighted to see treasures there which demand a prompt and regular return.