looked out the window this morning
and there it was
snow
it started to fall again
the last three days were strange
a lot of coffee and alcohol
last night i told everyone the truth about me
how i had no morals when it came to sex
it wasn't a good audience for such ideas
sometimes when you're drunk
you forget who your audience is
when i was little
i found out i really had only one talent
it was to know my audience
i could figure out motivations quickly
don't know what exactly happened
or when
but realized at some point before
my growth spurt ended
that everyone was pretending
but behind these pretendings
were something concrete
don't care if it is genetic or if the first five years of human life are so intense on the brain that we can never really escape.
knowing that fact for sure really won't change how I behave
not good at math, hell not even good at grammar
but good at figuring out people's motivations
at knowing my audience
which has led me to behaving like an actor
we are all actors
but i behave like an actor on top of an actor
then after awhile
after some drinks, usually the hard stuff
i stop acting and the concrete me gets let out
my mother always yelled at me, "You're half british, the british are stone cold Noah, don't show your emotions, emotions are a weakness."
My mother always told me emotions are for the weak, and when people see you have emotions they immediately take advantage of them.
It was a British thing to say
We must never forget that Great Britain gave birth to Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Burke and Smith. The stone coldest of all political philosophers.
Looked at my sleeping girlfriend after looking at the snow that covered the cars and parking lot, then went downstairs to read.
I was slightly hungover and felt like nothing good could come of all this.
i didn't know what 'all this' was.
the 'all this' seemed very real and concrete.
Went to make coffee and it tasted like vinegar.
So I drank orange juice.
Read the ending of
Antiquity by Norman F. Cantor. My favorite historian.
I don't know what kind of man has a favorite historian.
not the kind of man my father raised.
Norman F. Cantor at the end of the book talked about the remaining sites of antiquity that remain, the huge buildings where thousands of ancient people sat and gathered together
then he wrote, "The poets and dramatists and philosophers speak to us for antiquity, but those little sites of prayer and entertainment memorialize the millions who came and went, always silent, and now forgotten."
The first thing that weird me out was the use of the word 'for' when he says, "Philosophers speak
for antiquity."
He didn't say 'of' or 'about' or 'from'
a lesser writer would have used those words
but 'for'
what a strange little word 'for'
Norman F. Cantor was saying, everyone is dead, long dead, so dead that nothing remains of their lives but vague ideas.
But these writers, these people who used language as their medium spoke for everyone if they knew it or not, they were sending a message out, this is what we were like, this is who we were.
Then Cantor writes at the end, "the millions who came and went, always silent, and now forgotten."
I like his use of commas at the end.
I liked that he wrote a two hundred page book that took years of solitary and classroom study and finished it with this simple sentence. It was the last book he ever wrote, he died soon after, maybe this last line was his epitaph.
the ending is simple.
There were people once
ancient greeks, ancient jews, and people living under roman rule.
They had lived their lives under these institutions
they were slaves, oppressed women and powerful men
there were farmers and merchants and generals
playwrights and poets
shitting in outhouses, dealing with imperial armies and being part of imperial armies
babies were born and taxes were collected
and now they are gone
all gone
they died
"always silent"
after reading that line i went back upstairs to lay in bed with my girlfriend, my living, very real, very present girlfriend.
i was overcome with 'feeling' after reading that line and didn't know what to say
i didn't really want to exist after reading that line
i wanted to go somewhere and maybe become One with the universe
i couldn't deal with reality
so i just became sad, stared and was despondent.
told her i had to leave
cleaned the snow off my car and drove home
