I am eyeballing the bathroom floor as a song floats into the ambit of my consciousness -
It's been a long, long time
Since I've memorized your face
It's been four hours now
Since I've wandered through your place
And when I sleep on your couch
I feel very safe
And when you bring the blankets
I cover up my face
As I sing these lines to myself staring at the sparkling clean, graciously ordinary 1-by-1 white tiles, I feel like I’m close to the Mediterranean - the weather is on my skin. And so I sing the lines again…”it’s been a long, long time…” and this time I do with the lines what I do best - I squint my eyes as if I was aiming for a bull’s eye in a dart game which in reality I would never sign up for, I emphasise the words “long, long time” as if I were conjuring up a portal with this special, magical (I do not like the word magic - it makes the thing sound fake, when really, this stuff’s real!) incantation. And somewhere along the ridges of my shoulder I feel it coming. It is the Mediterranean kind of sadness - melancholy, yes, but 21st century ethos has impregnated the word “sadness” with enough - probably more - gravitas as can possibly be squeezed out of the archaic “melancholy” (yes, this is the age in which dictionaries will have to decide to mention “archaic” before “melancholy”). This sadness, like viscous liquor, rolls off of my shoulders and I begin to remember that this song, by Sufjan Stevens, was in the movie Call Me By Your Name - a favourite. Now, all of this has transpired within the duration of my bladder relieving itself, so making sure that all the tiles are indeed as white as I imagine them to be in my sleep (weird, I know - what are you going to do?), I leave the bathroom thinking to myself that all of this must mean something.
It does not really mean much. Except that with me it does. What a short foray into this sort of wistful strangeness really is, is that it’s like a seasonal re-evaluation of your wardrobe. Once every year (or twice, no judgment), you are just going to find clothes that a.) don’t fit you anymore (nothing to do here), or b.) you just don’t LIKE anymore (alert - everybody has an evolving style - accept yours). And so - or as I’d like to believe narcissistically as a litterateur (damn) - this song creeping up on me across my white as sin bathroom tiles was probably a re-evaluation of my calling. It really has been a long, long time since I thought about things I like to do in order to further the meaning of my existence, so to speak. It has been a long, long time, simply speaking - since I believed, truly, that literature is bloody awesome because it is life-affirming. The Mediterranean tonality that had set in wide across my bedroom with the lilting nostalgia of Steven’s voice, was nothing but the benevolent visitation of an old childhood guiding-spirit like Casper. Probably even just for the sake of humour (a HUGE part of literature, hands down).
Let me explain. Soon after I started a major in literature in college, everything including the syllabi and the level of belief that the professors showed in it, whipped up a colossal cloud of despair and doubt. Suffice it to say that this cloud was, like we used to say then, particularly ambiguous - it was there, and everybody could feel it and say something about it, but nobody could pin it down. This cloud of despair and doubt was nonetheless lethal, especially because it was a general sense of despair. Given that as potential philosophers it is our duty to engage in a cerebral battle with the shoddy underbelly of a reality which till high-school was rosy for us, we still failed to make sense of that reality and why it is so important. In other words, as potential philosophers, in our bid to become responsible historians of various kinds of oppression, we failed to remember to leave each story we read with something that could make us responsible human beings also. We failed to do what, I feel, was most required of us - inspire hope. As budding scholars, we could not sustain life-affirming forces in our academic experience. This resulted in the reader falling not more in love with life and literature, but less and less so.
As young, 20-something “intellectuals” with mush for pre-frontal cortices, we were gyrating in a whirlpool of meaninglessness and all around us were adults with money and families (two things one just could not imagine having then) who seemed to have “sorted” everything out for themselves. When faced with some of the despair from the mushy brains, these adults took respite in such words as “millennial” and “angst”. In the meantime, what was surging and spreading like wildfire across university-going folks of the humanities - across the country - was more than a dispositional problem. It was the problem of an age, a culture, and a society. It is a philosophical problem of the 21st century.
As soon as I left university, I started teaching in a school as part of a fellowship. I now teach English and Social Science to sixty girls in grade six. I teach them things that I love. I teach them how to close-read a story and enjoy doing it. I have realised that reading is a training; children can, and must be trained to read. “Ways of seeing” was the name of a postgraduate course that I did at the university, and I have a growing conviction that I have understood more about that course while teaching reading to these girls than I did during my time at the university. I teach them how there can be different kinds of funny - some stories make you smile, some make you smile and then press your lips together to keep it a secret. Some stories make you guffaw spontaneously - “ha! ha! ha!” Some make you laugh in your head where you say to yourself, “that’s smart!” Some stories give you the laugh of discomfort - “oohh, that’s sordid. But it’s good!” I teach them how to practice intellectual humility in an age where everybody is out to be an expert of something. I teach them to let their brains breathe.
And so. It indeed has been a long, long time since I have said to myself, “life is beautiful.” I have still not said this to myself, because I still don’t believe it to be true. But today I said it to one of my students. It was necessary. She is a story-teller - she likes building atmosphere, setting the tone and mood before beginning her narrative, any narrative. Most of her stuff is angry and sad. After having that conversation with her, I came back home and fell into a deep, deep sleep.
When I woke up, I went to the bathroom. I was groggy and probably debating whether I should go back to sleep. Then, like the last wisp of violet on the western sky before it all becomes black, the song came cascading across my white tiles…it’s been a long, long time since I’ve memorized your face…and I found myself nestling into the comfort of a primal blanket. I realised that after a long time, I am no longer pained by stories, pulled back by the weight of things horribly wrong in this version of our reality. I am no longer unsure if life, after all, is worth it. I no longer doubt that I can create purpose where there seems to be none. I am not burdened with the importance of important things in my life anymore - importance is a property those things will continue to have irrespective of anyone or anything. I am no longer an intellectual. I am now able to read again, with nothing but joy.