Paromita’s Reviews > The Physics of Sorrow > Status Update

Growing old is an adjective. We enter into the adjectives of old age—slow, boundless, hazy, cold, or transparent like glass.
There is also a mathematics of aging,..
We change the world’s proportions over the years. Those younger than we are grow ever more numerous, while the number of those older than we are declines menacingly.
Aging requires a certain audacity. It may not be audacity, but resignation.

...Now, as I page through them distractedly to kill time, I finally realize it—melancholy is slowly swamping the world . . . Time has somehow gotten stuck and autumn doesn’t want to give way, every season is autumn. Global autumn . . . Traveling doesn’t cure sorrow, either. I need to look for something else.
The saddest place is the world.

And thus my journeys naturally came to an end . . . I returned to the saddest place in the world, shattered. All that remained from several years of hotels, airports and train stations were a couple of notebooks filled with hastily jotted impressions...

We can only wonder what sense of time and the eternal the ones who came before us had, in the dark night of the primeval, living in their flimsy huts, outliving their flimsy huts, outliving their hearths, moving from place to place, measuring out their lives in days and nights, in lighted and extinguished fires

Let me write, write, write, let me record and preserve, let me be like Noah’s ark, not me, but this book. Only the book is eternal, only its covers shall rise above the waves, only the beasts inside, between its pages swarming with life, will survive. And when they see the new land, they will go forth and multiply.

If something is enduring and monumental, what is the point of putting it in a capsule? Only that which is mortal, perishable, and fragile should be preserved, that which is sniffling and lighting matchsticks in the dark . . . Now that’s what will be in all the boxes in the basement of this book.

In the dying light of the day I once again feel that inrush of obscure sorrow and fear, true savage fear, for which I have no name. I quickly put on my coat, pull on a hat with ear flaps, I could easily pass as either hip or homeless, that suits me fine, I’m invisible in any case.

At first you don’t get it. Then you start checking to see whether your phone battery has died. A sharp absence at five in the afternoon. At first it lasts around an hour, then it gets shorter. But it never disappears. Just like with the cigarettes you quit smoking years ago, but which you keep dreaming about.

In the newspapers I processed a while back, it said that “unfriend” was the word of the year for 2009. It feels like that’s all I’ve been doing these past ten years. Over time, friends have been disappearing in different ways. Some suddenly, as if they had never existed. Others gradually, awkwardly, apologetically . . . They stop calling.

And the next day I moved the most basic necessities for living into the basement. I spend most of my time down here. I feel at home. I mostly use the floor above as an alibi. If you put some effort into appearing normal, you can save yourself a lot of time, during which you can be what you want to be in peace.