Filed under: diary, the arts | Tags: kanye west, spike jonze, we were once a fairy tale
Not a big fan of rap, but this Kanye West x Spike Jonze production resonated with me. Hazy, surreal, and brilliant.
Kanye West x Spike Jonze, We Were Once a Fairytale
Won’t post any Youtube links because it will probably be broken by then due to copyright claims, and won’t mention what’s really inside the video. Just Google and find the video, watch, enjoy, and ponder.
It’s a mix of humour and sadness that appeals greatly to me.
Adam Sandler was excellent, and Drew looked so pure.
Filed under: diary, the arts | Tags: comment, E.M. Forster, email, letter writing, review, technology, the machine stops
It is amazing how prescient EM Forster’s The Machine Stops is, given that it was written way back in 1909, long before the internet was invented and the digital age even begun. Forster manages to encapsulate the anxieties and pitfalls of embracing technology, by illustrating a world in which the substance and warmth of humanity has been replaced by cold efficiency and shallow satiation of the senses.
Forster paints a world in which sterile and faceless technology has infiltrated all aspects of life. People literally live in their own worlds, as they do everything in subterranean hexagonal cells with various machines that provide for all of their needs. The Machine, as it is rather blandly named, provides everything that humans need. No one lives above the ground anymore, and air outside in fact kills. Public gatherings are “clumsy” and have since been abolished. Travel is often unnecessary since telecommunications is so advanced.
The protagonist, Vashti, is a mother who lives apart from her son Kuno, and communicates with him only through imaging plates and knobs that adjusts broadcasted sound. Their relationship has the air of formality one would normally reserve for strangers and professional acquiantances, and Vashti was reluctant to physically visit her own son who wanted her counsel and help. Mother and child are literally and metaphorically distanced. Upon realising from him that he visited the surface, she was shocked, and disappointed with him, and saw him as a disgrace to the Machine, a formless entity to whom she owes a larger allegiance and more affection to.
The dystopian world Forster presents to us is clearly a product of fiction, but I can see parallels that world has with ours.
A key feature of life in the Machine is isolation. Life is solitary, and much of the “needless” social interaction has been either abolished or reduced to electronic means. Just as people in the story interact through electronic intermediaries, we too are doing the same. Instead of meeting physically, we meet online and talk through phones and email. Subcultures that excessively trumpets the call for technology to engulf every area of our lives like the “Otaku” culture in Japan are emerging. Electronic gaming has become to many an adequate substitute for physical sports and a hour or two in the sun.
While people of the Machine was physically and spiritually segregated, we are yet to reach that point. I guess physical seggregation is impossible in this increasingly congested planet, but spiritual and emotional seggregation is already creeping into our lifes. We plug into our iPods and tune out the world, people marry later and many do not marry at all. Traditional religions are losing their hold to individualistic materialism and secularism. Many of our children grow up playing single player electronic games, not board games or marbles with their kindergarden and primary school friends.
Marshall McLuhan famously opined that the medium is the message. The form of communication often has an impact on the message itself, and has the insidious and subtle power to transform the very relationships between people. There some truth to this, in relation to the impact of electronic communications has on human relationships.
Compare traditional post with email. Sending a mail by traditional post requires more effort; one has to buy sufficient stamps, find out the applicable postal rates, obtain the appropriate stationery, plan the letter, vet and edit drafts, set pen to paper, seal the letter, affix the stamp, get the address right and finally make the trip down to the post box to send the letter. Email in contrast is free and just require you to tap a few keys and click a few buttons.
When one sends a traditional letter, one has to be careful. Words must be carefully selected because there are constraints, like the amount of space on a post card and the need to maintain the aesthetics of the letter by avoiding cross-outs and minimising corrections. These concerns are less pronounced in the context of email.
Care requires effort. And effort is an expression of the amount of value one places on particular relationships. Effort has the peculiar ability to strengthen relationships through a cycle of positive feedback. The more effort a person puts into a relationship, the more likely the person will cherish his counterpart. In economic parlance, effort put into relationships can be termed as “sunk costs” which motivates a person to stick with preexisting relationships instead of seeking greener pastures.
I read from somewhere before that a handwritten letter is equivalent to a personal visit from a friend. Having received a few in the past month, I must say there is a large amount of truth to that statement. Nothing beats the sense of warmth and pleasant surprise that one gets upon receiving a letter from a cherished friend in the mail and reading about her feelings and reengaging with the happenings of her life.
In contrast emails are utilitarian and to some extent encourages careless thoughts and words. It is little wonder that email often find its greatest use in the calculative and coldly rational world of business, where time is everything, speed and efficacy is paramount and effective communication of facts and orders and not conveyance of emotion is required. However email as a mode of communication is sorely inadequate between friends.
Sadly the culture of letterwriting has been on the wane, with the prevalence of email and the ease of writing electronic letters. Email clearly has its place and usefulness, but my concern is that the ascension of email will come at the cost of another avenue through which human emotions and warmth can be cultivated.
However I am also confident that letterwriting will not be abolished. As the persistence of print in the information age suggests, people do recognise the inherent value of old technology. I hope the value of letter writing is not lost on future generations.
Just as I find room for hope, Forster is not a pessimist in his story. There is redemption at the end of the story. Mother and son kiss for the first time,the first and unfortunately last act of intimacy and love between them and an admission that life in the Machine is in fact not really life at all. Hopefully, just like how Vashti reaches a moment of epiphany, those of us that place blind faith in technology at the expense of our very humanity will too realise the truth before it is too late.
Filed under: diary, the arts | Tags: fifty dead men walking, martin mcgartland
Can a person find peace with himself when he sacrifices the lives of people personally acquianted with him in exchange for the survival of an anonymous mass of people? Is the death of a friend worth exchanging for the survival of tens of other strangers?
This was the central recurring struggle that tormented the lead character Martin McGartland’s conscience in Fifty Dead Men Walking. I just watched the movie with J and I was well-entertained. While the cinematography and pacing were excellent and Jim Sturgess’s performance as a more animated and cocky counterpart of Tony Leung’s brooding, taciturn undercover cop character in Infernal Affairs was outstandingly believable, it was the fundamental conflict McGartland faced that most fascinated me.
As the title of the movie would suggest, is it morally, or at least personally, justifiable to sacrfice family and friends in exchange for the “greater good” of letting say, 50 men who one has never seen or heard before and are supposed to die, live?
Aside from the question of whether a crude and unfeeling utilitarian calculus can be used to justify or rationalise the sacrifice of human lives in exchange for others (e.g. 1 life can always be justifiable exchanged for 2 lives because 2 is more than 1), the problem of whether one is able to morally justify, and live with, the consequences of sacrificing everything that is real, tangible and personal in pursuit of an abstract ideal that seems so removed from one’s immediate concerns and perceptions.
In some sense, fidelity in this form is similar to religious belief. The Muslim God in particular has no physical manifestation, and in fact Muslims frown upon depictions of God. Hence to believe in God is in a way to believe in a pure idea, a non-corporal entity or ideal. Just like how McGartland betrays his “mates” (as he affectionately calls them) for the higher ideal of saving abstract lives, religious fundamentalists seek to fulfill their version of God’s abstract purpose and will by blowing themselves and others up.
I was also reminded of just how similar this form of love for the right is to the Duke Orsino’s rather ridiculous predicament in Twelfth Night: he was in love with the idea of love, and it took the trickery and cross-dressing of Viola to get him out of his self-imposed romantic stasis. Perhaps fidelity to an abstract ideal can indeed be counterproductive and undesirable, stymieing the proper order of life.
In the end each of us chooses his own poison. Life is perhaps a question of trading precious and finite time, health and effort in exchange for meaning and value, in the form of whatever endeavour we choose to focus on.
At the end of the movie I felt that McGartland was a hero. Yes, lives were sacrificed along the way and he had to betray his closest connections. But his bravery, courage and steadfastness were admirable, and the fact remains that his unintentionally Machiavellian ways did save many lives. In a perfect world everyone is a saint, but clearly perfection is a dream. In an imperfect world where circumstances are often out of the control of the hands of men, McGartland did the best he could while listening to the voice of his conscience.
Filed under: diary, the arts | Tags: genius, gradgrind, hard times, malcolm gladwell, outliers, self-made, success
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The path of success has not been trodden by many and is explained by even fewer. Success fascinates and has been analysed time and again, especially by the plethora of self-help gurus peddling recipes for success, and this age-old pursuit of mankind which does not fit itself to summary conclusions.
Joining the list of attempts at unraveling the mystery of success, Malcolm Gladwell has this to conclude about success in his latest book Outliers: success is the result of a combination of hard work, cultural factors and opportunity, not “innate” genius or natural ability.
This conclusion is unconventional; most self-help gurus will tell their audiences that success is the product of individual action, and indeed the entire American ethos is based on the understanding that race, religion, culture and other “background” factors have naught to do with the success of an individual who works his way up solely through his own actions and innate ability. If these factors helped at all, they provided the motivation for the individual to work his way out of a miserable existence; the person succeeds in spite of circumstance.
The difference between Gladwell’s view and conventional thinking is probably explainable. If success is not primarily or solely the result of individual work, the self-help legion loses its clientele. They have to preach this approach for fear of losing their ricebowl. Gladwell, being a purveyor of pop-general knowledge, adopts the more neutral stance of an interested researcher and observer on the subject of success.
Gladwell traced the personal histories of extremely successful people and found that it took a serendipitous coalescence of culture, opportunity and sheer hard work to precipitate success. He cited the example of Bill Gates, who was the only kid at his age and time to be given the opportunity to have unlimited access to computers, and hence the opportunity to hone his programming skills. Asians do better at math because of their roots in the strong work ethic and culture necessitated by rice cultivation, and the manner in which Asian languages deal with numbers (e.g. instead of saying “eleven”, the Chinese use the English equivalent of “ten-one”). Practise of 10,000 hours is the rough minimum required to achieve expertise in any skill or subject.
From a practical and common-sensical point of view, this seem to make sense. Gladwell’s reasoning seem to pass the simple rules of causation; if Bill Gates didn’t end up with the opportunity to use computers for so long, he probably would not be where he is today. No computer usage, no success.
However this method of reasoning can be expanded and applied ad infinitum, leading to ridiculous conclusions. For example, what would happen if a different sperm met the egg in Bill Gates’ mum’s womb? We can say that without this event, Bill Gates would not have existed. Do we then say that the sperm and egg lottery is crucial for success in life? Certainly it makes sense. We can extend this method of reasoning to almost every event in Bill Gates’ life. Do we then conclude that every event, from the most minute to the seemingly crucial, is important? If every event is important, it leads to the paradoxical inference that none of the events are important since relatively speaking all events count. Therein lies the Achilles’ heel of Gladwell’s book.
Yes, it is easy to poke holes in Gladwell’s research and thinking on success. If we adopt the stance of a statistician or even a scientist, we will tell him to plot graphs and find correlations between IQ and success in life. Give us cold, dependable statistics, rather than causal connections seen by a single (albeit well-read) individual. That said, the accuracy of statistical methods is doubtable: correlation can be found between almost anything if we look hard enough. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, philosopher of risk and uncertainty and writer of Fooled by Randomness fame (a book that I heartily recommend for anyone who believes wholeheartedly in a deterministic universe and the accuracy of conventional statistical methods), would tell you that.
However an unsophisticated approach to causation and causal analysis is inevitable for a pop-journalist like Gladwell, and I mean it without a hint of disrespect or disdain. We lead our lives working in such a manner too, and any extensive and sophisticated approach to analysing our lives will make decision-making practically impossible. Life just can’t happen without reductionist thinking.
Despite the apparent flaws, I do still agree with Gladwell’s observations. A disclaimer: I have not arrived at my personal conclusions on the basis of painstaking statistical or scientific analysis, but rather on the strength of my personal experiences and beliefs, which I believe any common man would use as their own basis for their own personal conclusions.
As one matures, youthful brashness is slowly replaced by a recognition of human vulnerability and the interdependent nature of our existence. As I grew older I gradually realised the contours of my abilities and learn to cope with my shortcomings as they surface and try to capitalise on what I am good at. As I grew older and had a longer history to ponder and analyse, I begin to note that any success I have in life is the combination of a myriad of factors, many of which are not entirely controllable by my own hands.
Looking back on what I have done and the opportunities I was given, I have gradually moved from an attitude where I took things from granted to appreciating the miracle of existence, a shift which occurred probably due to the process of maturing as a person.
Being in the gifted education system engendered an early belief in self-determinacy; whatever I have got was as of right or due solely to my own hard work and abilities. Of course this led to an inflated sense of self-worth and ability. The government preached meritocracy and the whole economic system was and still is premised on individual work; I naturally became a firm believer in the Gradgrindian idea of the “self-made man”. Success is the result of me, me and me. Nothing else. Encountering the supposed virtues of lassez-faire economics fanned the flames.
The first chink in the armour came when I studied Charles Dickens’ Hard Times for my junior college literature paper. The Victorian society depicted by Dickens is eerily similar to the modern Singaporean one where capitalism ran rampant and individualism grew, and the character of Thomas Gradgrind embodied the mistaken belief that the self-made man existed. Dickens set out to show that no man can achieve what he has in life through himself solely, and to expose the myth of the self-made man, and he did so by unveiling the hypocrisy of Thomas Gradgrind, who brags about how he climbed up the social ladder from the “gutters” through his own hard work without the help of others, through revealing the fact that Gradgrind had a caring family who took good care of him.
That book got me thinking. Then came various events in my life that gave me the clearest of signal that however hard I may have tried, the tides of fate may turn against me at any one moment. Amongst other events I failed to obtain the scholarship of my dreams, despite getting near perfect scores for my ‘A’ Levels. Currently I am yet to achieve the grades I know I am capable of in law school, even though I work really hard. These events validated the hint of doubt and changed my perspective. Success is a mixture of chance and work, and today whenever I see someone who is successful, I always factor in this element of chance and avoid hero-worship of any kind.
The best conclusion, I think, is that success is complicated, just as life itself is, and anyone who says that he or she is self-made is making a fallacious and untenable claim. Success can be largely due to innate ability, but we can never conclude unhesitatingly that ability is the sole cause of success. Indeed, Gladwell does not outrightly deny the role that natural aptitude and genetics have to play in the race to success. Culture and opportunity are but two other factors out of a multitude that synergises with aptitude to create success. We will have a more holistic, realistic and healthy view of the world if we recognise that no one is an island. There are no true Gradgrinds, only happy results of the machinations of fate and endeavour.
Filed under: diary, soundtrack, the arts | Tags: the band, the last waltz, up on cripple creek
I first encountered the Band when I was in junior college; I borrowed the DVD for The Last Waltz from the school library (yes, RJ library does kick some serious ass) on strength of the fact that Martin Scorsese directed the film.
I didn’t appreciate or understood the merits of the concert then. But now I do, and i struggle to find concrete reasons. The Band just seems to grow on me with the years passing. Might be because I am growing older and bluegrass/country singalongs are beginning to stretch their claws over me. Breezy croons with swagger to boot. I like.
Lon Helm is a god.
091008
“I can tell you frankly, 7 out of 10 lawyers here don’t like to come to work. Yet they still do. Sometimes I have trouble getting myself to work at 9am everyday.”
This was what my tutor for trial advocacy said to us today, at the end of our last session. Coincidentally, I was talking to L about how life would be after law school. Days spent in the four walls of a cubicle, agonising over every letter of a contract you are drafting, feeling happy that the font size you chose was readable and pleasing to the eyes of fat cat clients which balls you have to lick everyday.
Our tutor told us not to waste our law degrees. Try out practising for at least 2 years, just to find out what you like, and whether you can take it. Coincidentally, I was talking to L earlier as we made our way to the firm where we had our lesson about how we can say that we will try practising for a few years, but the inertia at the end of that few years will be too overwhelming to overcome for us to change things. Because of money, or family, or expectations, or sheer laziness, we will choose to live on autopilot after that first few years of practise.
This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.
Filed under: diary, the arts, training and nutrition | Tags: Haruki Murakami, review, running, thoughts, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
031008
People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits, that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life
I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two everyday running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reaing books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.
Filed under: diary, the arts | Tags: into thin air, into thin air review, jon krakauer, review
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I am beginning to become a fan of Jon Krakauer, a writer whom I think writes really well about the lives of people living on the edge of experience, rejecting the tragedy of a bland existence. Straight after finishing Into the Wild (the review of which I am yet to write, regrettably. I am trying to find a slot of time when I can write a really thorough review of it) I reserved Krakauer’s chronicle of the doomed 1996 Everest expedition, Into Thin Air.
Filed under: diary, the arts | Tags: comment, review, the Death of Ivan Ilyich, thoughts
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While it might be exceedingly hard currently to physically travel McCandless’s route through America, I am at least able to trace his literary trail. He read and admired the works of Leo Tolstoy and one book that accompanied him during his wandering was Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I fortuitously stumbled upon this book at my local library while browsing and borrowed it after realising its connection with the movie and book I liked.
It is a snappy yet profound read that stirs up much interesting thought about the purpose of life. I am penning some of my thoughts about what I feel the book has to say here.
Filed under: diary, the arts | Tags: into the wild, into the wild quotes, quotes
I just watched Into the Wild last week. I am yet to find sufficient time to properly pen my thoughts about the movie and its enigmatic main character Christopher McCandless.
Memorable and meaningful quotes punctuate the movie, and I shall precede my ruminations by posting some quotes that I found to be particularly meaningful and thought-provoking.
Filed under: diary, the arts | Tags: backpacking, Christopher McCandleness, essay, jack kerouac, meaning, moby dick, on the road, purpose, reflections, travel
I read Kerouac’s On the Road and Melville’s Moby Dick during my backpacking trips this year. It is no coincidence that I chose these two books specifically to bring along for my trip (books occupy space and adds weight to packs); On the Road is a chronicle of Kerouac’s gallivanting journey across America while Moby Dick is about Ahab’s quest to achieve his personal goal of slaying Moby Dick and exacting revenge for his lost leg. A common vein that went through both books is that of a journey, a quest that is imbued with great personal meaning, which I found particularly appropriate for a backpacking trip. The books provided much intellectual fodder to ponder upon as I roamed the countries and drew parallels and comparisons between what I construe from the books and my own experience.
On the Road does not rank high on my list in terms of artistic merit; it is not the most pretty novel I have read and there are not much literary acrobatics. Granted, Kerouac’s stream of consciousness style stands out but as Truman Capote puts it, it is “typing”, not writing. The most artistic aspect of the book to me is the occasional well-crafted, pretty phrase that punctuates the flowing prose and means so much and nothing at the same time (“It made me think that everything was about to arrive – the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever”, “the bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down”).
The book is unabashedly a chronicle, with little pretensions of having any deep and profound observations to make about the human condition. It is personal, detailed and painfully mundane at times. Journeys are described, buses are taken and rides are hitchhiked. To a reader who craves a larger theme or significance to the actions of characters in novels like me, the description of mundane mechanistic bits and pieces of traveling minutia bores.
Perhaps the apparent lack of some larger theme is itself the meaning of the novel. Keeping in mind that Sal Paradise and his friends are on road trips, the physical journey is also a spiritual quest for a deeper personal meaning in life. The value is in the journey, not the destination, and the experiences that mould and shape a person while he is on the road. One might not find the ultimate meaning in life at the end of the road trip, but the vain attempt is itself valuable and results in personal growth.
Each person constructs his or her own concept of what is valuable and important in life, and it is not up to Kerouac to decide what is important for each person, hence the lack of a didactic quality in On the Road. This fits with the postmodern and existential concept of Man, where the individual is isolated and personal meaning is a construct which grants meaning to otherwise empty lives.
The more I read the book the more I believe that life itself is one long road trip. We move onwards and we meet and part all the time, never looking back. We might revisit places and people but the passage of time makes them different each time we see them again.
Being constantly on the move does not mean that we lose our inherent need to connect and have relationships. Sal’s friendship with Dean Moriarty is the consistent thread that binds Sal’s otherwise haphazard journey around America together; it is the only constant in a book where everyone is moving, meeting and parting. While fate draws people in different directions we try to preserve and maintain old connections and establish new connections with others.
I personally long for a larger meaning in life, and I believe that Sal and Moriarty were seeking something bigger in their travels too. I have a need to fit my actions to something with a larger significance; a life lived well is one lived with purpose and goals. Embarking on a road trip to unfamiliar lands is an attempt to discover a purpose in life previously hidden in the white noise and grind of normal routine.
If Sal indeed does not find his purpose, Ahab in Moby Dick has always known his purpose, which he pursues mono-maniacally to his own self-destruction. I felt a strong contrast between Ahab’s obsessive pursuit even at the cost of his own demise and my peripatetic and aimless wandering around the streets of the countries I visited as I flipped the pages of the book. I don’t know which one is better: the attainment of a goal or the journey? Perhaps there is really no better option since everything is personal. However I am usually wary of relativistic claims.
The unknowable machinations of fate and man’s smallness in the face of the infinite cosmos stands in opposition to the attaining of individual goals. We fight the world and carve a path to what we want. The sea in Moby Dick is a metaphor for the wild, natural world and how it remains essentially uncontrollable by man. We remain at the mercy of movements larger than us, and Ahab’s eventual death at the hands of the sea is a grim reminder of how the pursuit of purpose can be cruelly stopped by the random workings of fate. This concept of man’s helplessness is also the stuff of tragedy, and Dionysian philosophy. Maybe Kerouac is right; we should value the journey and abandon hopes of finding or achieving individual purposes. Perhaps, like Ahab and Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, the nobility of man shines not from the attainment of a goal but the struggle and effort invested in its pursuit.
Central to the concept of a journey is the idea of escape. Sal’s attraction to Dean, a carefree wild man, is partly due to his innate desire to break from the rigid confines of ordinary life, society and authority. Ishmael confesses that every once in a while when he gets bored with life on land he goes out to sea as a seaman. I travel to experience something new, to leave what I have grown to be used to at home and find something new.
Escapism is an intricate concept and there is a fine line between escaping from something and escaping to something. We travel to leave emotional baggage behind, and we travel also to find something new to bring back. I guess all journeys involve both forms of escape, and it is the mixture between the two that matters. There is a push and pull for every journey.
I wonder if a journey motivated almost entirely by the need to escape from home and present life is a healthy and desirable one. On the other hand is a journey where there is no need to escape from what is happening at home a real journey at all?
Looking back I struggle to formulate what exactly I am escaping from in my travel and what I seek to find. I guess it is a very complex mixture of things. The need to ponder upon possible directions to take regarding my relationship with a particular girl. The need to escape the dreariness of Singapore. The need to see something in my life (I am hopelessly undertraveled). The need to make up for lost time. The need to be with a few old friends. The need to meet new people. The need to test myself on the road. The need to build confidence.
The travel bug has bitten me. I am irrevocably going down the road of endless uncomfortable, even masochistic backpacking journeys, living off street food and bunking in crap accommodation. The will to death? Maybe. Self destruction or seeking absolution? Christopher McCandleness sought the latter, probably.
The isolation from society is also appealing to me. I understand what McCandleness wanted to escape from: the stifling confines of social expectations, the emptiness of social class, the superficiality of social graces and polite human interactions. Note that all of these stem from society, where humans interact. Sometimes I feel that I am selling myself to people who don’t really care, and the smiles I get are just throw-away hypocritical attempts to remind you that you exist in their hearts but actually you only occupy the back end of their minds. When you say thank you you don’t really mean it; when you ask how are you you take any response. A retreat to nature, or a new environment where nobody knows who you are is a retreat from the crap we get in normal social existence.
We live in a modern age where things come to us rapidly and easily, which skews our minds and make us, as Nick Caraway puts it, “careless people”. We use and throw, we have lost touch with what is real and the value of effort. McCandleness rejected his privileged upbringing for precisely this reason. It is artificial, and meaningless to get something for nothing. Absurd even. Retreating to the wilderness and the dangers of the road exposes us to the reality of nature, the normal way of things. Survival is hard, painstaking and good things only come with effort. It is this element of honest living that I crave so much.
I thirst for the challenge of the road. Backpacking is a test of who you are so that you know more about who you actually are. As John Krakauer notes perceptively, the roadtrip is a rite of passage for many, a test from which one emerges as a new, better person.
Even though the new school term has just started, I am already planning my next wandering trip. I don’t know where the road will take me next, but I am eager for it.
Filed under: diary, the arts | Tags: carson mccullers, loneliness, review, the heart is a lonely hunter
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“They are all very busy people. In fact they are so busy that it will be hard for you to picture them. I do not mean that they work at their jobs all day and night but that they have much business in their minds always that does not let them rest…the New York Café owner is different. He watches. The others all have something they hate. And they all have something they love more than eating or sleeping or wine or friendly company. That is why they are always so busy.”
I must admit that I am a sucker for books with nice-sounding titles. Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one such book; the metaphor is so apt and the lyrical quality of the title made it necessary for me to read it. Its title hints at what the book’s themes are, and these themes appeal to me greatly because I can relate greatly with what McCullers had to say.
