Things calm and sturdy
I have never learned how to conscientiously study. I half heartedly leaf through the textbooks, become bord, and wander into the kitchen in order to graze. Other times, I find sections of my textbook more interesting than what I'm supposed to be studying, become engrossed, and read the entire chapter while touching none of the material on the test.
This evening, I grew restless and excited about what I was studying. I was too excited about what I was studying to pay attention and concentrate on the material. I read and studied Herodotus for about as long as I could handle, but the more I read, the more I wanted to sketch down the ideas I was being flooded with. I kicked around the clothes on the floor of my room, feeling a rare intellectual fervor, and even feeling like I was glimpsing at something vague, something still formless, but something very universal.
This was a wonderful feeling, but it left me skipping downstairs in the hopes of writing and sketching out my ideas. My plans for writing dissolved when I saw my father at the computer, and what was intellectual restlessness lost it's form and melted into an ordinary antsy feeling. I paced some more. I scoured the kitchen for food. The television was taken up with James Bond videogames. The living room occupied by the blasting Cuban music.
I wandered past the windows facing west. It was now nine, but the sky was one shade more grey than turquoise. Without ever really thinking about it, i wound up pacing the outside of the house. Despite the rain, the stone pacing wasn't damp, and I hardly felt the dew through my socks. I was held in thrall by the sky; a most odd shade of twilight. I sat on the steps of the back porch, and could see so many details of thethings around me that I nearly convinced myself that it was hours earlier. I could see shapes and space, and depth of field. I sat staring.
The cat reared on his hide legs and froze time and space. What might've been a few years later, he fell on a bug and began a twitching and writhing dance. I stared at the sky, and at the red lights refleted in the western overcast section.
I felt nothing, not in the air and not within me. I sat, and thought. There's something solid and weighty about the word pensive, and that's what it was. My thoughts were a calm and heavy presence. There have been times when I think and write, and I have felt so terribly watched, so public, that I feel an inner buzzing. I have felt exposed to an unidentifiable enemy. I have felt irrational needs to impress. I want to make a show of myself. I start itching to move about again, to be memorable. Worse, I find myself completely inadequate for expressing what I see, and I screw with what I try to say, delete it, start over, and finally lock myself into words that aren't right.
I thought calmly, and beautifully. I didn't worry that these were silly things, that I could be criticized for thinking them, that they were worthless to think about.
I thought about the Romans, I thought about Herodotus and history. I thought about people. I thought about Claudius, how much I wish I knew him. I pondered the cliches, the new ideas, the ones I've already worn thin with overuse. I sat, without an ounce of anxiety in me, and watched, and waited, and thought.
There's something beautiful about being able to sit by myself. There's something rare about just thinking, being still, watching an eerie twilight and a frozen-in-place cat. There's something achingly unpretentious about it, and I mourned somewhat when the metal teeth of the garage door gnashed and groaned, and the whirring and buzzing of Being Watched started up again.
2000-06-15, Things calm and sturdy
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