wherever you go, there you are

some thoughts on moving and friendship: my response to Marc Borillo

by Claude Monet

“We are on a mission: we are called to cultivate the earth.” — Novalis

Luckily I’ve come across Marc Borillo’s great post (go read it), in which he wrestles with some interesting ideas. Seeing someone wrestle on the page is one of my favorite writing genres. They say that the best art is the one that inspires the creation of more art. This post is my response to Marc’s. Remember: I know very little. This is just how I currently think about these ideas, not an attempt to tell anyone how to live their life.

1. I’ve moved a lot more than I would’ve preferred. Still, at least I didn’t have to move too far, never out of the county. I’ve never lived abroad and the longest I’ve stayed abroad is two weeks. Discovering the new city or town, preferably by strolling around without the plan, is something that brings me a lot of joy. Moving to a different place makes me finally see it more clearly. It’s like standing too close to the artwork, drowning in details, and then moving back a couple of steps to really see it for the first time.

2. I am a patchwork of all the places I’ve lived in. Like people close to me, they get under my skin the more time I spend in a place. I hear echoes of places I’ve lived in my voice. I catch myself saying something that doesn’t belong to the current place. Of course, this also happens with those closest to us — we carry little patches of them in our voices. We are usually not aware of these patches and to whom they belong to. We become painfully aware of them if we stop being close, especially so if death suddenly separates us. Places are like that to a lesser extent. Places absorb their own echo, so you have to leave the place to hear its echoes.

3. My mother told me too many times how changing routes from point A to point B is good for the mind. How exploration and novelty makes the mind more flexible. But novelty is everywhere if you pay enough attention. The world reveals itself not only by exploring the shallows but also by diving into the depths. If you take the same route you will inevitably learn about different things you see on that route. If you take it regularly at the same time, you will inevitably meet someone. Other passengers or residents. By making the route familiar, you become familiar.

4. Say you want to hire someone. And a lot of people apply for the job and you don’t have time to interview them all. After how many interviews will you make the hiring decision? Places are like that. Life is short. You don’t have time to try them all.

5. Wherever you go, there you are. Seneca to Lucilius: “How can you wonder your travels do no good, seeing that you carry yourself with you?”.

6. I think we live in a culture which is afraid to commit. “Always have options”. “You don’t know what’s going to happen”. Maybe this a feature of our rapidly changing world. No one is sure what the future brings. But did our ancestors knew what the future brings? Luckily they decided not to preserve their optionality since otherwise we wouldn’t be here. I think good things happen when you make commitments for what matters. When you make promises that you’re not sure you can keep. Perhaps commitments turn us from children into adults. They add weight to the character.

7. We overvalue novelty and undervalue familiarity. Children love familiarity more than we do and they can teach us to appreciate it more. They say that you only read the book when you re-read it. The pile of books to read keeps growing, there’s always some new author to acquaint myself with, and each new book I read expands the pile, but returning to an old friend is revealing. Physical books don’t change as time passes, but I do. So they tell me in what ways I have changed when I re-read them. Forgetting why I loved a book and then remembering upon re-reading it is also such a pleasure.

8. One of my favorite books is Zweig’s The Struggle with the Daemon. In it, he analyzes the three “greats” who suffered from severe mental illness when they got older: Nietzsche, Hölderlin and Kleist. He compares them all with Goethe.

The first thing that is obvious in Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche is their detachment from the world. The daemon plucks away from realities those whom he holds in his grip. Not one of the three had wife or children, any more than had their congeners Beethoven and Michelangelo; they had neither fixed home nor permanent possessions, neither settled occupation nor secure footing in the world. They were nomads, vagrants, eccentrics; they were despised and rejected; they lived in the shadows. Not one of them ever had a bed to call his own; they sat in hired chairs, wrote at hired desks and wandered from one lodging house to another. Nowhere did they take root; not even Eros could establish binding ties for those whom the jealous daemon had espoused. Their friendships were transitory, their appointments fugitive, their work unremunerative; they stood ever in vacant spaces and created in the void. Thus their existence was like that of shooting stars, which flash on indeterminable paths, whereas Goethe circled in a fixed orbit. Or (to return to a previous metaphor) Goethe was firmly established upon solid earth, into which his roots spread ever wider and deeper. […] Nietzsche’s solitude was as wide as the world; it spread over the whole of his life until the very end.

This is not to say that “old nomadic wolves” will necessary have mental health issues. Still, I think Goethe lived a better life than Nietzsche, even though he complained about his kids being spoiled brats from time to time. Children are weightless, ancient Romans rightfully called them “liberi”, the free ones, because their weight is carried by their parents. We expect heaviness from the adults, so it is unsettling to meet a weightless senior. I’ve met my fair share of them, particularly when I was younger and was going out more. Old punks whose lives revolved around drinking on park benches and then moshing at some punk gig afterwards with kids twenty years younger than them to the sound of broken glass from what remained of beer bottles beneath their feet. Punk wasn’t dead because of them, since they were the only ones carrying the torch as all the other posers either got married, employed or had a kid. After I reached a certain age, I decided to make commitments, since the weightlessness became unbearable. This weight that you carry as a parent anchors you to the earth.

9. I’m not a psychiatrist but I think all mental illness isolates you from the world. Mental illness is a form of blindness. Of being unable to snap out of it. Not seeing anything else. The more you are untethered from the world, the bigger the risk of ending up isolated.

10. I think we are biased to seek novelty in relationships as well. We speculate about the potential new friends, exciting new conversations. We are easily seduced by the allure of the Other. But there is immense value in having old friends, in people that have known us for years. In people that have witnessed both our wins and setbacks. In being known deeply, in being seen. And also of course, in witnessing how they change as they get older and how they deal with both wins and setbacks that inevitably come, in attempting to see them fully. This becomes hard if you move a lot.

11. Losing a friend is bad and losing a friend you have known for years or even decades is especially bad. Moving away too far from old friends makes this more likely.

12. Excessive introspection also isolates which is why I am currently trying to live more like I’m watching myself from the third person, floating somewhere behind my body. What is the best way to play this character I’m controlling to solve this particular problem or setback? If my friend was in this situation, how would I suggest him to act? If I look back at this situation thirty years from now, what can I do today to minimize the chance of regret? After all, we are all passing through.