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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


08.14.07, tuesday

My own. What's that after five years? Meaningless. Books, clothes, a jade bracelet from my mother. All for time, eventually. For dust and thrift shops and maybe a child with my DNA entwined with another's, imprinted by forefathers and foremothers, those who had never thought of themselves as such, only lived, belonging--it seemed--to things, to houses, to sensibilities, to a place called, for instance, Phnom Penh, Paris or San Diego.

Then they stopped belonging. They forgot their attachments; simply, they died. Only the living belong to the dead; only the dying relinquish belonging. Only now am I learning how to die; I have to learn this everyday.

Depressing, Jimmy says. But I dunno. Since I know that I am dying everyday, I am less quick to cling (although I will, of course, never let go). I belong less. Or I am more likely to laugh at those things--jobs, expectations, disappointments--to which I was expected to belong completely.


. . .

"It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e. simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course go on doing that-), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer. But how can they, who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?"--Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet




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