Sometimes life brings you moments - long or short - packed up with many tasks and many errands and many, many places to run to, many matters to attend, and so you may find yourself at the end of the day stretched out in your bed, drained of all will and strenght, turning tired eyes to something you love, something you'd love to do or occupy yourself with, but can't even muster enough energy to conjure a move to slide closer to it. This is not an unusual happening in my life, and it happens on and off, and sometimes it's not a matter of enough organization or not in your life, it's a matter of being drained.
A few weeks ago I retook the reading of Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and once again, just as it happened the first time, I found myself, yet again taken away, kidnapped by my daily life and it's many tasks and matters and issues, big and small, and unable to rip a few minutes and a cup of energy to read. Miller keeps walking with me, safely tucked away in my bag, placed on my nightstand every night waiting for that cup of energy when the minutes muster to gather up or waiting for the minutes when the energy has been summoned.
And so I have plotted and strategized and awaited to the very last lunch hour again to escape into the emptied diner and set myself in a table and read my 45 minutes away. Have escaped to nearby diners and restaurants to avoid any coworker that might decide to feel "pity" for me and keep me company, effectively ruining my reading time with unrequested kindness and thoughtfulness.
Thus I have mastered to break a bit of my day, a slab of my energy for Miller, take him out of my bag, spread him open and have his crude ways flow around me.
Haven't finished reading him yet, but I am absolutely enraptured by him and his style. A thing one must understand about his book is that it isn't a story. There's no time linearity, no chronological order, no story or happenings to follow, but rather a journal of thoughts, thoughts happening with no particular array, with issues and topics dictated by the mood. The elongated chapters and the ongoing developping of the particular thought isn't for the modern reader that requires predigested, bites cut neatly into small pieces, that happen and conclude in less than 1,5 pages. Miller lets his thoughts run on the morals of Parisian whores on and on for pages and extracts from his swirling of the topic a magnificent, simple principle: whores should behave like whore. Don't pretend to be what you are not, and no matter what you do, love your freaking job.
For chapters then fehe details the matters of his daily life, his never ending hunger, his striking poverty, the leeching and depending on the charity of people he despises, whom he looks for, and whom he coaxes into giving him money, a place to stay and/or money. The thoughts here are rich, as he evidently, in the eyes of the outsider is a veritable parasite, always preying on friends and family for the things he needs without actually considering the possibility of working to support himself. Ungrateful, seeking only whom to use, whom to pester for money to spend on whores. Whose food to eat, whose booze to drink. And in his own words, without him making any remark on the matter, you come to the conclusion that he's an annoying person you don't want to cross paths with, a lazy begger of the worse kind, who not only sneaks up to you for food, money and shelter, but also expects you to then allow him all the liberties he wishes for. Support with no responsabilities acquired.
But then, from his unapologetic point of view, you realize the cicle in him. He hates his benefactors, despise them for expecting something in return - and these he accuses of making a slave of him, and can't wait to break from their chains - or for expecting nothing. These later ones he despises for the charity they give to him, holding them basically for saint wannabes. And as he leads this life of leeching, of dependance from others to lead his own life, to have someone to bitch about, he's hit with a fundamental truth, an epiphany of life: Stop expecting a miracle to change your life, because that miracle may never come.
He decides here to go with the flow instead of bitching and constantly living in dissatisfaction, and accept what he has in front of him.
Whatever his decision, though, it was a thought I lifted up from the book, as there's so many people in the planet waiting idly for a miracle to happen in their lives to change their lives, to take them out of their misery and into a life of happiness. Some expect to win the lottery, others expect to get a handsome inheritance, and the most common of these expectancies, is that seen often among women, where they expect for the Prince Charming to come to their lives, marry them and change their lives to finally live happily ever after. What if the miracle happens and it is unpleasant? You don't win the lottery, but you get robbed, you don't get an inheritance but the IRS comes after you for tax evasion, your Prince Charming is a douchebag who likes to beat up women, cheats all around, gives them no money and lock them in the kitchen, pregnant and barefoot. Then what?
Reflecting on my former elementary school classmates, it isn't hard to realize that life, in the end, is the result of our decisions, the decisions we make in the present to which we have conducted ourselves through the decisions of our past. Do you wish to keep postponing big decisions, do sheer nothing or take shortsighted decisions while expecting an external force to change YOUR life?
The peaceful realization also came to me that, self-help and motivational books are not only a farse, but also a joke on intelligence, as the best thoughts and realizations don't come from such worn, partialized, tendentious pages, but from every book, if you are truly open to their inlaid philosophy and you can distinguish between what works and what doesn't do it for you.
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