What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to fall over the cliff

Ancient Rome never gets old.
Hehehe.
There are way too many cool things at the Met--it's almost obscene. They have O'Keefe. They have Manet. They have classical sculpture and pottery and jewelry that's thousands of years old, and they have a temple. Like, a whole Egyptian-style temple. In the museum, reassembled, and it is GORGEOUS. This all happened before I saw their Degas rooms, and that happened before I found Van Gogh.

[The only Holden moment I had today was seeing the fountain in the middle of Central Park; I think that, at one point, he just went in and soaked himself. I could almost see it while I stood there--a teenage boy just walking in and getting drenched, fully dressed, staying in the water for a second like he was acknowledging how strangely right it was. I wanted to go in myself.]

I could have sat in the Greek and Roman room and stared at statues of deities all day, but I sort of took an abridged tour of the whole museum instead. I'm going to come back though, someday, and do exactly that; I'll walk through the entire exhibit, all day, and read every single plaque on every single item. I'll skip lunch and probably dinner too and stare at all these wonderful things, just like their creators stared at them millenia before I existed even as an idea; and for that day, it will be like I am standing side by side with an alien people that walked a different planet, though in the lifetime of that planet we might as well have lived side by side. Then I'll do the same thing in the Medieval Art exhibit, then Van Gogh, and my life will be just a little bit different from that point onward.

I admit it. I'm sort of hopeless, falling in love with all these things all at once (but who could help it, in the end, it's one of the occupational hazards of thinking). Actually, no, I'm incredibly hopeless--crazy, really, partly full of clouds and wind and imagined things while being stuck to real life and spinning the air around to try and make something else. And sometimes I revel in today and sometimes it just makes everything unbalanced, almost, like I have no energy to get up and move my mind and process the things coming at me. I had that spark this past year, up through some of the summer, the signature thing that just sort of made my life awesome. There was breath in it, and a lot of belief. I sort of figured out why I wanted to take this mini-vacation from the world--I wasn't trying to find that spark, I was trying to learn to live without it.

I don't want to learn to live with or without anything. I just want to live.
There now. That sounds like me again.

L
 
PS: I was changing my facebook status and just wrote this, and it sounded true. I believe that the truth needs to be reported, and I wanted to save this for when I need a reminder myself: Don't ever believe it when someone tries to tell you that words don't make a difference. They are the difference.