2023-04-30 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: 🌷 Spring 🔆 Weekday: Sunday 🗓 Date: April 30, 2023 📅 Week: Apr 24 – Apr 30, 2023

Today is an experiment in going back to Notion for my morning journals. In some way, this feels slightly less intimate. Sitting alone in the dark, hunched over a notebook, the soft flicker of candlelight — that feels more evocative to me. But the fact of the matter is that it’s slower, and I’m at a point where I’m writing enough that getting thoughts onto the page is actually the goal here, as opposed to just building the habit. I’ve been thinking about how often I really want to write, and that’s a great sign. So now I just want to get the words out here.

One interesting experience lately is how often I’ve been seeing people and imagining their stories. Or perhaps more specifically, how often I’ve been feeling some emotion arise out of their imagined stories. I saw a couple on the street this morning, the fading dawn sky above them, the two teetering through playful teasing as they rubbed the sleep out of their eyes. One wouldn’t be terribly hard-pressed to imagine a narrative for them. A young couple, let’s say they met through mutual friends. It’s SF after all, so they probably both moved here for work, her after graduating from Columbia and him from UC Berkeley. Actually, I hate that this story is becoming too SF-tech based — let’s throw that out. In reality, they probably were tech people, given the pairing of Patagonia and a Google backpack, but that’s far less interesting. In fact, who gives a shit about their jobs.

In fact, I’ve been thinking a bit about the two approaches to character building. I wrote a while back about something that Brennan Lee Mulligan talked about, which is the difference between reactive and proactive characters. Now that I’m reflecting on it a bit more, those categories feel pretty clear. In the reactive category, you have people like Billy Pilgrim and the main character of just about every Haruki Murakami novel. In the proactive category, you have people like Kvothe from The Name of the Wind, or Estraven from the Left Hand of Darkness. In many cases, characters exist on some spectrum here, but I think the categories are relevant. Stories involving the former are much more about being whisked away into some unknown (and perhaps unexplainable) world where the events of that world necessitate the action. Billy Pilgrim is simply drafted for the war and abducted by aliens. It was never his choice. On the other hand, although Kvothe was the victim of circumstance, his actions are of his own volition, albeit predicated on some valid reasoning. Estraven is perhaps driven by his unique flavor of patriotism and strong moral compass, but his rationale is somewhat less compelling.

I feel like the former is more approachable to me, but that may in fact be because I personally don’t have that latter sense of extreme agency. And I don’t actually think the vast majority of people do either. We just so happen to have been born in the time and place of our lives, and as such we live them out. We can be highly agentic and make all sorts of things happen during the course of our brief lives, but that often feels like a fantasy. We’ll die anyways, so it goes. The reactive approach feels like a “shaking up,” it’s a change where we are forced out of the confines of what we already know, of an ordinary life becoming unusual. The textures are all new, even the familiar ones.

The texture of emotion is as interesting thought. I often thought of them as having some color and size, and while those are mostly culturally conditioned (why is love red?), they’re there nonetheless. (I say that, but love isn’t really red for me, although it is warm.)

Alright, took a break to talk to Thorne, although he stepped away and hasn’t called me back, so \shrug.

There’s something that I was talking with Dan and Tania about last night. We were touching on the idea of “difficult” books, and one of the ones that came up was The Great Gatsby. I didn’t find Gatsby “difficult,” but I can understand why it is. The thing about that book, and about so many “great” books, is that they touch on something incredibly vague. There’s something about them, about Gatsby in particular, which is about rallying against the universe. There’s something ineffable there about the human condition, that no matter what your class or creed is, you’re stuck with this time on earth where you can’t and shouldn’t have all the things you want. There’s a loneliness in that, this missing attachment that you can’t resolve. How do you know it’s going to be alright?

I keep coming back to Murakami novels because something about his main characters resonates so strongly with me, and part of it is that helplessness, that feeling that something is missing, regardless of what it actually is. That there could be this greater plan that you don’t understand, but that that plan isn’t actually there and never will be, but also by extension that’s exactly how it should be. I suppose, in some way, that’s also Slaughterhouse Five. One would think that an understanding of the nature of time would make our time here more meaningful, but what is meaning anyways? You’re just a stroke of paint in this 4D collage. May you contribute to that cause.

And perhaps that’s all that writing is anyways. May your thoughts be more beautiful than you could know. Who gives a shit where the story goes, as long as you get to the next sentence. May these streaks of color light up the sky. You could make this place beautiful.

Thread of a story I was thinking about before: you see a version of yourself on TV/out in public/whatever and eventually end up killing them, only to later find yourself in the same situation as where you first saw them.