Sir Penguin
Hrm...erm hrm. Excellent form, soldiers.
I couldn’t resist. I love penguins. I love their stately air, especially the way Sir Nils waddles neatly between gravity and whimsy.
From Speigel Online, via Arts & Letters Daily
Cleaning Out the Inbox, or Nepenthe
There is something to be said for the art of forgetting.
Time does not heal all wounds so much as it accustoms us to their aching. Time sands down the edges that pricked us, shifting them just out of focus: we are nearsighted creatures. The past never needs to move as far as we think it does to elude us. It takes so little to make us forget. Maybe we are looking for distractions.
Going through old correspondence reminds us of what we have lost. Well, it reminded me, anyway. Part of me wants to do the mature thing, appreciate what we had while we had it, and accept that nothing lasts forever. But part of me is mourning afresh. The wounds have not healed; they were just heaped with debris.
Now that I have rediscovered this warmth, I would not forget it for anything — not for surcease of sorrow, not for new loves. I would not give up these memories for anything — but I cannot help wanting what was.
Good friends are so rare. And as I get older it becomes harder and harder to love.
Solitude
It’s awful. You think you can get used to being alone, mistaking simple misanthropy for the banishment of desire, but hope springs eternal, swinging the gate again to loneliness and disappointment. Pandora was also Theodoros, and the gift she brings us is despair.
Wow. That was unnecessarily melodramatic. But it is really hard. Just when you think you’ve grown accustomed to the loneliness, it recommences gnawing with its little dull teeth, and there, again, is the ache that reaches out and grasps at empty air, the flailing, whimpering animal I have not yet learned to silence.
The Bible says we were not meant to be alone. But I want to prove the Bible wrong. I, who am different in so many other ways, must be misfit in this way also. I want to be strong enough to be alone. I shouldn’t need anyone else. Need is a sign of weakness, and weakness cannot be tolerated. It is a moral failing, inadequacy, deficiency. Self-sufficiency is the one thing I must not, cannot fail to achieve.
The abyss on the other side of need is a thousand times more sinister than its austere sister, dark silent companion to solitude. The abyss that lies behind clinginess is a bankruptcy of self, abject and skulking, the abdication of independence, the subjection of duty to desire.
I will be strong. I will be vindicated. I will be true of voice. I will prowl alone on the windswept steppes, stalwart and unafraid.
Such vows, such grand vows.
If only I could keep them.
