To me, Chinese is unparalleled in its ability to describe a certain state of mind: 七上八下，患得患失。焦慮。騷動。不安。They feel quite far away right now, looking at it from without. In my mind's eye I am standing on a pin-prick of a desert island on a sunny day, watching a storm that has just passed. No one would know that it had been and gone save for the lot of trash & broken bits washed up on shore. Some sure signs during: talking to myself in the office (to the bewilderment of my colleagues) and writing indecipherable notes to myself in various forms of social media (including the blog).
I am prone to fits of anxiety, though it is hard for the calm and sober side of me to believe it.
On good days I feel like this:
Except I begin to wonder whether it is from the peasant or from Icarus's point of view. Whatever the case, the day he fell was (indisputably) one fine day.
These are not so good.
The state I most enjoy is that of The House was Quiet and the World was Calm, or Frost at Midnight. But the pitching and tossing - is that also me? More importantly, do I want it to be? Do I have a choice? It does, in any event, make me feel that some very powerful organ is not my own.
So I'm setting myself some seemingly dull and mundane tasks: think positively, and if I can help it, don't think too much at all. But it's all easier said than done.
And it still leaves a lot of open questions - like where do all the unnamed things go?
I am prone to fits of anxiety, though it is hard for the calm and sober side of me to believe it.
On good days I feel like this:
Except I begin to wonder whether it is from the peasant or from Icarus's point of view. Whatever the case, the day he fell was (indisputably) one fine day.
Quite often though, it's more like:
These are not so good.
When I think of myself in pictorial (or mathematical?) terms, I often see the fluctuations of a Sine wave, and myself, standing atop one of the peaks, desperately attempting to flatten it out, even just a little (because too much of this roller-coaster is really not altogether desirable). Though I'm reluctant to think of myself (like my grandmother does) as a character in a melodrama, full of emotional highs and lows, I still have to concede that right alongside my apparent cheerfulness and rationality, there seems to be a vast quantity of total battiness as well.
The state I most enjoy is that of The House was Quiet and the World was Calm, or Frost at Midnight. But the pitching and tossing - is that also me? More importantly, do I want it to be? Do I have a choice? It does, in any event, make me feel that some very powerful organ is not my own.
So I'm setting myself some seemingly dull and mundane tasks: think positively, and if I can help it, don't think too much at all. But it's all easier said than done.
And it still leaves a lot of open questions - like where do all the unnamed things go?
2 comments:
They're always nearby. Just take the second to the right, and fly straight 'till morning. It helps if they're out looking for you.
thank you. though it seems to me quite likely that we are not talking about the same thing(s).
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