Mushroom · Samba

Time to lift quotations.

Again, I've been looking at Jonathan Carroll's blog. Here's a quote from James Salter.

But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It is very difficult to find. It is like money. It comes only once. If you are lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there is nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready. And nothing happens. It happens to all the others. Yes, you think, it will happen to me. And every year you have more to give, nothing is spent, nothing is taken away, you are richer, you are laden, and every year the same: nothing. Until finally there are almost no others, you are left alone like one flower in a great meadow, and it is autumn, yes, the days are growing shorter, the grass bends beneath the wind. And the sun comes and shines on you still, alone in that great field, the last flower, beautiful, yes, because of that, and there you are in the long, endless afternoons, waiting, waiting. 

Jonathan Carroll also posted a poem by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska called "Love At First Sight." Since Livejournal's template system simply refuses to have me make any changes to the format of an entry (case in point: to make additional line breaks and spaces so I can post a friggin' poem, even if I'm already fiddling with the HTML of their so-called Source function), just google it up and call it culture for the day; I would suggest the English translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

So I was reading it and after the first stanza I got the feeling I had bumped on this poem before, just couldn't remember where. Certainly wasn't in class back in university. When I hit the last line of the second stanza, it made sense and I figured it out. I first heard the poem in a Hong Kong romance movie called Turn Left, Turn Right, which I had watched admittedly only because Takeshi Kaneshiro was playing the male lead character (I am NEVER going to be taken seriously again, am I? Though in fairness to the movie, it was a very interesting concept, though lifted from a poem. I just think the ending was too flaky). The movie is an interpretation of the poem's theme, about two people who....well, you can figure it out, the poem's all over the Internet and it's not hard to understand (the poem's theme I find is in the last line of the second stanza: "Perhaps they have passed by each other a million times?"). And now that I've read the poem again I definitely see how it connects with the movie. And it is a beautiful poem. Lines I particularly appreciate (here we go, it's unavoidable):

• Such certainty is beautiful, / But uncertainty is more beautiful still.
• a moment face to face / in some revolving door?
• Every beginning / is only a sequel, after all, / and the book of events / is always open halfway through.

As for the movie itself, I wouldn't exactly watch it again if it weren't for seeing Takeshi Kaneshiro play a musician (a violinist at that too). I don't even know why I'm talking about this movie, though I strongly suspect it's because I like being reminded of him. =) And honestly, at the risk of sounding like more than half of the girls in East and Southeast Asia, he really is a looker. I'd post a picture of him, but none of the ones I can find in the net can really do him justice.

*wince*

I simply cannot believe I'm saying all of this.

Still....

...he looks so much better with longer hair. Short hair looks so ordinary on him.

Oh, here's a picture of him that isn't bad. This one too.

...

I really should stop now, shouldn't I?

I stood in the middle of the road, rain streaming across my face. Let me be, let me be, for a little while. Forever.

I watched from the window in silence, the curtains bunched up in my fist.

I walked across the puddles of water, my red umbrella drawn.

I bent over a bowl of rice.

I climbed a wall thousands of years older than me.

I shivered under the claws of the howling northern wind.

I reeled on the lake, letting fear hate me through the glass.

I ducked under the stone awnings of the little alleys.

I listened to the whistle on a pigeon's feet as it flew above me.

I waited as time mocked me.

I looked at the light that I could never enter.

I talked to the moon while she danced before me in all her splendor.

I chased the blue as the clouds threatened to cover him.

I paused to think as humanity swept past me on leather shoes.

I strolled in the courtyard of kings.

I laughed at the face of a spirit being broken.

I heard my heart beating when I saw color everywhere.

I dreamed of grassy plains and the shade of a tree, the sweetness of sleep.

I saw the cities and the clouds fall below me as I rose higher until there was only the sky.

I ran in my blindness, the future in my eyes. 

I was always running. I wanted the road never-ending so I would never have to decide where to stop.

I will remember. Let me be, let me be, for a little while. Forever.