© Aron Hsiao / 2001

“Time does not suffer itself to be halted; there is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him.”

(Oswald Spengler)

Earlier this afternoon I read another article, this time in the Atlantic if I’m recalling correctly, that talked about life in terms of a series of particular stages:

• Learning and development (teens)
• Ideas and vision (20s and 30s)
• Exposition, development, and writing (40s and 50s)
• Teaching (60s and onward)

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard (or read) this bit of wisdom. In fact, I’m not sure I can count how many times I’ve heard something essentially similar to this. In this case, the author was reflecting on their experience amongst professional writers and journalists, saying that in effect this rang true.

I suppose there is something to it all. By the time I was finishing my Ph.D. I did feel as though my brain was different from what it once had been. And this does seem to be a period in my life in which I’m more attuned than ever before to the practice of communication, and in which I feel compulsions to write, even if I’m not writing much in particular at times.

But it does make me wonder what lies ahead. It often feels as though most of my life hasn’t really been in any of these stages, but has rather been about “problem solving.” Problem solving not just in personal life and in career life, but even my career itself seems to have been a series of posts in problem-solving—mainly small logistical and practical problems, with little room for my own ideas or vision. The Ph.D. was the first time I really got to exercise those parts of me.

Given that it took me so long (nearly my first four decades) to arrive at a place at which I could express ideas (I’ve always had many) and actually have people pay attention to them rather than deign to listen to them as a matter of relative status differences, I’m not sure I’m quite ready to give the “ideas” part of life up so quickly.

And yet it’s also true that I have felt my mind evolving over the last few years. I don’t mean in terms of feelings or opinions or politics, though I mean those too, but also in terms of the way that it works. It has become much more restrained, more stable, more patient, which is all good—and at the same time far less passionate or intense.

I suppose this is what they call “getting older,” and (I can now more clearly see) why so many people become more measured and conservative as they age. Your mind just feels differently from the way that it used to feel, and it leads to different modes, habits, and outcomes of thought.

— § —

© Kamil Macniak / Dreamstime

The other way I can measure my increasing relative age is through my attachment to email.

Because of my unique background, I came of age in email. During my most formative years, from the time I was nine or ten years old all the way through my teenage years, email was how I communicated with all of the most interesting, important, and infatuation-worthy people in my life.

This now manifests as a constant feeling of annoyance with text messaging and with Facebook, which intensifies the older I get.

Everyone wants to communicate through text. Nobody even reads email.

Yet every thought or communicative impulse that I have I imagine in email-sized chunks and visualize first and foremost as email in an email window. Mine is an email brain. While it’s worlds away from fountain pens and blotters, I still live in a mental universe of letters and letter-writing.

I don’t have thoughts as short as texts. When I text with people, I tend to translate emails into texts, plugging in a keyboard and sending dozens of lengthy texts all in a row, boom, boom, boom, as though I were pounding out an email.

I always wake up at some point in the midst of this behavior and realize that what I’m doing seems bizarre and unhinged on the other end if the person is of the “text” generation.

Why is he throwing sentence after sentence at me without letting me get a word in edgewise, littering up my phone?

Because I think in groups of 800-1,500 words, and I presume, unless I actually sit down and think about it, that you’ll read them and send the same back in a day or two.

Of course you won’t; if I’m texting with you and send you 20 texts in a row of 50 words each, you’ll write something right back, right away which always also throws me. I’m never expecting that immediate response. Intellectually I know that you could do that, but it always bursts my expectations when it happens. Because after that last text I’ve sent your way, I’m saying to myself, “Whew, that’s said, now I’ll go and do something else and tomorrow I’ll read what they think in return.”

But of course it doesn’t come tomorrow, and it (appropriately, in the formal sense) doesn’t actually contain much thought much of the time—just a single brief text in return, as is appropriate for texting.

I’m the contemporary equivalent of the letter-writers who stuck doggedly to their pens, pads of letter paper, and wax seals years after everyone else was talking on the telephone.

© Aron Hsiao / 2002

People tend not to appreciate clarity when they have it. It’s taken for granted; it becomes a part of the background of everyday life. It seems so self-evident, and even more to the point, it often points toward what-is-to-be-done, often not done yet, and so can even seem to have something of an irritating character.

There have been times in life when I wished that I was more hazy, or that I was “one of the clueless people” so that I slid through life with only a vague idea of what might be happening.

That sort of wishing is beyond stupid.

It is only once clarity is gone that it becomes clear just how much worse life is without it. Even if clarity tells you that you are both miserable and sunk, you are at least left with the courage of your convictions and an understanding of yourself and the world to which you can refer.

At this moment in life, I live without clarity, and it is terrible. Not knowing the good from the bad, the right from the wrong, the desirable from the undesirable, moment by moment; not having any idea which action is the right action and which action is the wrong action—these sorts of ambiguities make life miserable.

The thing that I long for most in life right now is clarity. Clarity of memory, clarity of purpose, clarity of belief, clarity of understanding, clarity of initiative, and of course clarity of future, which everyone would love, to some extent, but I’d certainly settle for the rest even if clarity about the future is impossible.

To not know what you think or believe, to not be able to weigh the things that you know and remember—it is an unsettling feeling.

— § —

The fireworks are going off. It’s summer but it’s not too hot. The car is running. My career is reasonably sound.

It should be a fairly good season in life, but of course it isn’t right now.

— § —

I wrote another chapter today. It’s funny, with fiction.

It’s so easy and yet also so hard.

I look back at the state of the book so far and it’s quite good, I think. But this “quite goodness” blies a number of difficulties that I suspect are at the essence of the difficulty in writing fiction.

First, just because I think that it’s quite good doesn’t mean that anyone else will think so. It is a reflection of my psyche and particular habits of language, not those of others, much less of any “general public.”

Second, the fact that it is actually quite easy to start writing, to blast out some chapters, then to begin to to line them up in interesting ways, to craft a skeletal outline to hold them up, and then to write to fill in the gaps—doesn’t mean that it’s an easy process to go through, big picture. It’s not the labor or the imagination that’s hard. It’s the letting go. Letting go of illusions, letting go of possibilities, letting go of insecurities, letting go of aspirations. These things are hard to do. It’s a mental difficulty—not a creative one, but one related to the ego.

Third, with each new word you write, you also increase the reality of complications and the need for rewrites and revisions later on. As you do work, you make work. This is a different kind of “letting go” but it is also letting go nonetheless. You have to let go of the idea of progress, and of the desire to be free of the work. Otherwise, you will hesitate to do it, as to do the work is to make more work.

But in any case, I am working on it once again. At the same time, I have the distinct urge also to work on another writing project. Something for kids, maybe. Something more fun. Something lighter and happier.

I suppose that speaks to what is missing from my life right now, and what I’d like to increase in it.

— § —

Some people just can’t quite ever understand each other properly, don’t see each others’ deep feelings, though everyone has them.

That’s one of those sad realities that you hear as a young person and dismiss to some extent, but as you get older, you realize that it’s true.

And whether or not people actually see each other deeply and empathetically has as much to do with what they already think is appropriate behavior for different emotions as anything else. It’s a matter of culture and background. What does “sadness” look like? What does “happiness” look like? It depends on where you go.

“People are people,” goes the conventional wisdom, but it’s bullshit. If people were simply people, most of the conflict in the world would end. People are different. And they cannot tolerate these differences. And to say that this is sad or wrong doesn’t change the fact that it is true, for everyone.

What a ramble. But I suppose that’s how things get on a Sunday night.

— § —

So here I sit, listening to the fireworks and feeling time pass underneath and through me as I race toward 41 years old.