つつじ祭

What if you slept?

And what if in your sleep, you dreamt?

And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower?

And what if, when you awake, you had the flower in your hand?

Ah, what then?

—-Coleridge

Hello.

I don’t think I will be writing anything substantive and meaningful until after 6th June, for my mind is chalked with so many things and numbers – and a recent love for Justice Bao series episodes (though I increasingly grow disillusioned, you should hear my cheeky comments to JRV about the uselessness of Bao’s interventions, how he only knows how to use which chopper on which, and how Gongsun Ce does not even know acupuncture…)

有时候彷徨，有时候无意间感到无比的欣慰。

心中的一堵墙，有时感到无人能打碎，可你是那么的坚强，那么得可爱。

能够过着草莓日子，我真是个幸运娃娃！

享受人生，虽然是考试时期，但能够尝到美味食物 – 我最爱的“花巻”，有小猫咪陪着，深夜 Esbjörn Svensson Trio (Breadbasket, Mr.and Mrs Handkerchief… Surreal names for a jazz band). ..

Life delights in LIFE.

I try to tell myself MONTAIGNE…There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge. We try all the ways to lead to it. When reason fails, we use experience.

I was in Borders that day to choose your birthday present…I thought I knew what I wanted for you but I chose something else. A book you would never be able to guess but I know you will love.

I made sure that there were no marks on the book, not even a scratch, the way you love your books.

I made sure there were no bents on the first cover.

I made sure that it was a book you have not read before, but when you do, that you will feel you have been reading it your whole life.

I made sure it is a book you will fall asleep to (a challenge, not Mills & Boon) and yet something that will give you shivers at strange opportune moments.

But best friend, all the 4 YEARS I’ve known you and what can I say, you are the sort of person I respect yet want to do things to you. Insert example:

(apparently, a real life dog).

You know my secret thoughts before I speak them, you are the muse of my letters and words, you eat xiao long baos without breaking them, you are the Irving of my hoodie, the Schroeder of my youth, the carrot on a snowman, the second helping of Cornish clotted cream, the brilliant law genius, the stomping Shirley Temple, the icing on my pink Singin in the Rain cake, you know the lyrics to all the old, old musicals I love, you court and date Katherine Hepburn, you dance to Fred Astaire, you look at me in the same second when we hear a vintage piece in a movie, you read Kazuo Ishiguro and sigh in the same way you read the Bibimbap Lawyers’ emails, you make the most wonderful 皮蛋瘦肉粥, you are sadistic and yet undeniably sweet, you are the male version of Ramona, yet the admonishing voice of Beatrice, you will be the character that never commits a crime in an Agatha Christie novel, you will watch black and white movies with me, you will hold me even when I am wearing five inch heels and cobbling over Covent Garden to go for Belgium with you, you were London and strawberry pokky, you are the boy whom your chinese teachers love to seduce (so The Graduate)…

and now you just appeared on Skype…so I am leaving to speak to you.

*chortle.

Laughable Loves

Rather depressed and lonely tonight, there haven’t been pictures uploaded lately, as haven’t felt in the mood for that.

 I feel more ancillary as the days go by. Wishing something could happen to whisk the current state away of longing.

When you miss someone but that someone has forgotten about you.

When reading Kundera, I often feel like the other character, the ancillary person, who is evoked to made a point, whom is tested on like a social experiment to effect the point of the certain professor. I’ve practically finished the whole of Laughable Loves, and when I finished the book I stared into the air blankly for a period…and then suddenly broke down into a long cry. I don’t know why it happened, maybe it has been due for some time.

On another note, the cat has grown independent and does not want to be cuddled any more.

I read this passage from Kundera which I loved :

She experienced this same anxiety even in her relations with the young man, whom she had known for a year and with whom she was happy, perhaps because he never separated her body from her soul, and she could live with him wholly. In this unity there was happiness, but it is not far from happiness to suspicion, and the girl was full of suspicions. For instance, it often occurred to her that other women (those who weren’t anxious) were more attractive and more seductive, and he knew this kind of woman well, would someday leave her for a woman like that. (True, the young man declared that he’d had enough of them to last his whole life, but she knew that he was still much younger than he thought). She wanted him to be completely hers and herself to be completely his, but it often seemed to her that the more she tried to give him everything, the more she denied him something: the very thing that a light and superficial love or a flirtation gives a person. It worried her that she was not able to combine seriousness with lightheartedness.

Another one:

Why in fact should one tell the truth? What obliges us to do it? And why do we consider telling the truth to be a virtue? Imagine that you meet a madman, who claims that he is a fish and that we are all fish. Are you going to argue with him? Are you going to undress in front of him and show him that you don’t have fins?

If you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth, only what you really thought, you would enter into a serious conversation with a madman and you yourself would become mad. And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us. If I obstinately told the truth to its face, it would mean that I was taking it seriously. And to take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one’s own seriousness. I have to lie, if I don’t want to take madmen seriously and become a manman myself.

But in truth I am taking these out of context, it is better you pick up Kundera’s Laughable Loves– a truly remarkable book, although a tad disturbing and the stories encircle your daily consciousness long after you have read it…and submerge into your daily conversations… like a lost pin at the bottom of the ocean which is indecipherable but you know it is lingering there, waiting to prick you and leave you wanting.

The first story Nobody will Laugh was particularly my favourite…has the aura of the song…(was it the Beatles?) I Started a Joke…and started the whole world crying…

I’ve never read The Great Gatsby, though loved the movie. It reminded me in the strangest of ways to Philadelphia (and yes, made me depressed that it was haute couture after all, Katherine Hepburn in haute couture!) and I’m in a sudden mood to read every single novel that F Scott Fitzgerald has ever written.

Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed round the belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors – these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to tuch processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze.

I want images, I want fancy, I want to escape in a book and not come back for the moment. But every ten pages, I read a line of Schweser – see, my cat is now poised over the page which discusses the relationship of coupon rates to duration- she always sits over the blackest of pages, and becomes a little blacker herself.

I feel a little better writing all these, although my thoughts have scarcely formed words.