the saturday boy....
2.54 p.m
selections from Life After God by Douglas Coupland
"Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy."
Now: I am an affectionate man but have trouble showing it. When I was younger I used to worry so much about being alone - of being unlovable or incapable of love. As the years went on, my worries changes. I worried that I had become incapable of having a relationship, of offering intimacy. I felt as though the world lived inside a warm house at night and I was outside, and I couldn't be seen - because I was out there in the night. But now I am inside that house and it feels just the same.
Being alone here now, all of my old fears are erupting - the fears I thought I had buried forever by getting married: fear of loneliness; fear that being in and out of love too many times itself makes you harder to love; fear that I would never experience real love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point which everything is negotiable.
For so many years I lived a life of solitude and thought life was fine. But I knew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinking that unless I knew what was going on inside someone else's head other than my own I was going to explode.
pg 110
I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying perhaps too much. But there are these feelings inside me which badly to escape, I guess. And this makes me feel relieved because one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity, the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary, to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss. I guess this is what your mother is responding to. I make a note in my mind to talk about this with her.
And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.
167
Now: there is so much you don't know about me, things I haven't told you, for instance, I do have a family, that I believe there is a God, that I was once a child, and that I have fallen in love twice and that neither time lasted. But how much of this matters in the end if you are alone. What is our memory? What is our history? How much a part of us is the landscape, and how much are we a part of it?
"Why is it so hard to quickly sum up all of those things that we have learned while being alive here on Earth? Why can't I just tell you,
'In ten minutes you are going to be hit by a bus, and so in those ten minutes you must quickly itemize what you have learned from being alive.' Chances are that you would have a blank list. And even if you gave the matter great concentration, you would probably still have a blank list. And yet we know in our hearts that we learn the greatest and most profound things by breathing, by seeing, by feeling, by falling in and out and in and out of love."
pg 121
If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it's that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.
.. how often is it we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness - so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points?
"The fact of the matter was that he was simply a very far-gone desert rat. I felt naïve and middle-class for having hoped - even briefly - that I could bond with the unbondable, for thinking that all it takes to make crazy people uncrazy is a little bit of hearty attention and good sense.
