Today is my 33rd birthday. Is that old? It's younger, maybe, but not young young. I'm edging the middle.
Sean has a birthday numerology theory based on the jersey numbers of famous athletes. He claims that the balance of good/bad in the year ahead is directly tied to the greatness of the players that wore that number. All things considered, this could be a good one: Larry Bird, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Patrick Roy all wore 33. Don't bring up Tony Dorsett (Cowboys are banned).
The years are speeding up. It's like being on a train that goes faster and faster - I can see the view out the window, but the finer details have started to blur (and I know what seems fast to me now will someday appear luxuriously slow.) I'm trying to fight against this. I was reading Walter Benjamin's essay on Kafka the other day, and in it he quotes Malabranche, calling attentiveness 'the natural prayer of the soul.'
I like that. This blog is one of the ways I try to pay attention. I see and read so many miraculous things in the course of a day that managing and cataloging them becomes its own task. I know I can't keep it all crystal clear and perfect, but I try to keep what I can. In the foreword to the collection of essays I'm working through, Hannah Arendt describes Benjamin reading voraciously and filling notebook after notebook with quotations from what he read. I like that, too. Even if quotations are interruptions in context, as Benjamin says, it may be the best we can do. A life can only hold so many wholes. We have to make do with a shorthand of personal meanings. Luckily, fragments can be pretty marvelous and the sedimentary way they accumulate has its own mysterious delights.
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A few things I have enjoyed lately: this book, lunch here, these paintings. I love living in this city.
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Previously: 32, 31. Time marches on.
