august

a month of swelter

by Félix Vallotton

This past month has been a month of unbelievable swelter that bound me to the indoors. The tragic attempts to restart the old habits, to catch the glimpse of some discipline, to prove to myself that there is more to life than waking up, working, and then going back to sleep again. Parenthood makes me gravitate towards the indoors and the swelter that grips me and puts me inside and slams the doors shut doesn’t help. I dream about the autumn candles and the sound of red, brown and yellow leaves, rustling after every step in the forest and the smell of rain. I dream about the cold days of autumn, of the overcast skies, of the sound of cars passing through the puddles. The rain splattered windows, Bon Iver songs, waterproof jackets. But I also know that I’m going to miss the sun, because I’m going to forget about the swelter.

We try to catch some fresh air as early in the morning as possible to go for a walk, because otherwise these walls start to feel more and more like solitary confinement. I also started going to the gym again after eight months of parental leave. The feeling afterwards makes me remember why I liked going in the first place. But then I get sick and the discipline goes down the drain again. Again, I need to start from the beginning. Again, I need to learn the lesson I keep re-learning.

In one of his interviews, David Foster Wallace said how literature enables us to inhabit the mind of the writer and see the world through their eyes in a way that is not possible with other forms of media. All art seeks communion with the artist and this is especially true for literature. What is undivided attention, a resource that is mercilessly being harvested in the age of social media, and the requirement for any reading, but a form of affection towards the creator. This is why I’m immensely grateful to you, dear reader, for taking the time to read my attempts towards the beautiful, good, and true. This is why I have an obligation to try my best with every attempt; I don’t take it for granted.

I am grateful for being born in the age of the Internet, since it has not only enabled me to put bread on the table, but also exposed me to a lot of great writing which taught me things about myself that I didn’t know I knew. The earliest example of this I can remember is me realizing that I’m a slow thinker after reading an essay about it. I don’t like to get into debates. I don’t talk fast and I think people who do are trying too hard to leave an impression that they are intelligent, which often stems from some sort of insecurity.

The Internet makes geographical proximity irrelevant which is not only useful when searching for a job, but also when searching for like-minded people. Isn’t it wonderful that you can find people excited about any of your niche interests, often not understood by friends? Everyone likes to think they are very unique, yet there is something immensely comforting in finding that almost any thought you can have was already had by someone from the past or present. There are few joys in life greater than stumbling upon my own brewing thoughts in their crystalized form in someone else’s writing. “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts”, Emerson wrote,” they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

Reading Murakami made me realize that some of my strange thoughts are not that strange after all. Reading great fiction is a form of therapy — you’re not paying someone to listen to your craziest thoughts and validate them, but you are witnessing that your craziest thoughts are not that crazy and not that unique. Great fiction enables inhabiting other’s inner worlds which always leads me to the same conclusion: beneath the surface we are all more similar than we think.