pre-New Year
it had been a week pressed up against the radiator in my living room, in an empty house where hours coiled lazily around the pile of books stacked up beside the sofa, with strains of jazz softening the stern silence in the background and the severe winter outside. there's a certain sense of the elemental in being alone, a quiet taste of self-definition without the pressing exigency of obligations to time, deadlines, accursed to-do lists - yes, even other people. the books that had been screaming to be read were read, the music that had been awaiting a quiet moment to be played was played. days like blank canvasses.
quiet moments like that illuminate the pressures of temporality. the way every waking moment is placement - an astonishing lattice of coordinates delineating our carefully-eked-out position in space-time. as we surface in that uncertain area between sleep and consciousness, our mind calibrates: i am [name], it is [time] o'clock, i am under my sheets, in my bed, in my room, in [place], today is [date], [year]. most of this takes place even before consciousness, and perhaps, apart from a bleary glance at the bedside clock, unconsciously. yet every day is a remarkable positioning of the self, a constant orientation.
is it a luxury? in original simplicity, we had no need for such orientation, but progress has its merits. perhaps with the development of maps, clocks, paper, myriad ways to cartograph our existence, it became a necessity, as first the understanding and subsequently the constitution of our selves began to assume the inclusion of such instruments.
but over the week before new year, i glimpsed its true nature: burden. it was good to measure time with merely the rising and setting of the sun, or indeed to feel neither the need nor inclination to glance at my wristwatch. it was good to explore other worlds and places through the pages of my books and forget the very pillows on which i leaned, or indeed to remember that outside my window was the rest of Warwickshire and England and a planet. and it was good, the disembodiment, the sense of a self without recourse to others.
nonetheless, it's also good to be back in term space-time, the chatter of friends and lectures spinning their old familiar webs around you. as how countries are defined as much by their boundaries as by the boundaries of others, or else a planet of meaningless terrain; as how any minute-interval is hemmed in by the minute before and the minute after, or else a flow of meaningless time. and so it's a burden we gladly take on, in order that we might make something more, something meaningful, of our selves and lives.