I find I am a regular factory of thoughts too unfinished to be essays. When I try to build them up into something substantial, they turn back on themselves, devour themselves, become absurd, embarrassing, or else crumble to dust. At the same time, all these thoughts run together, appear to be part of a single vast web of thought, which I can never articulate because I do not know where to begin, but which obsesses me, which I can never stop thinking.
I have tried for some time to deal with these thoughts by venting them on my friends and family in the form of "emails" and "conversations." But, though my friends are strangely indulgent of this habit and have not fled my company as one might expect, I find the approach has other downsides, downsides I shall not name. I have determined therefore to share these thoughts in a more public forum. Perhaps this will solve nothing, only time will tell. I wish to begin with an especially unremarkable thought, a thought sure not to go too far.
The world of the past was not simpler than the world of today. Quite the reverse: it was far busier— richer, denser, more elaborate. The literature had more words, the painting more marks, the architecture more decorations. Each house, each window, each cornice, each cup, each plate, each suit, each dress was unique. And the further back you go, the more this was true: after all, what could be aesthetically busier than a wild wood or an uncultivated field? It is the modern world that is simple, clean, regular: each thing like the others of its kind, each building, each block, each street, each city.
But the old world was dark and quiet, and the people were not so numerous. The modern one is loud and bright and packed with shoppers. Maybe minimalism is a response to overstimulation.
How I long for that old, dark, intricate world, which I may or may not be imagining.
3 comments:
I long for that world, too. The thing that holds me back from really longing for it, though, is how often children died. Living at a time when one would bear children and expect that some would inevitably die would sap my capacity to enjoy that world of hand-wrought cups and cornices. I know you might say that the death made everything realer or lent substance to the joy. But, at least for me, it would have been too much. I'd have gotten lost in the wild woods.
Maybe I should have left out that bit about longing. As you can see, I've reduced it to a single sentence. It's not what I meant to emphasize. Or not at this juncture.
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