2023.09.07
Chapter 2.
9. The wise person says, 'I do not know how the Universe came to be.'
10. 'But I'm pretty sure it wasn't my fault.'
Now, there's nothing on Earth like the love of a teenage girl for a teenage boy. I mean its borderline insane, it's a physical thing. It's painful. It's proper nuts. I've wondered why this is, and I can only assume that its nature's way of compensating for the fact that teenage boys are fucking idiots. They are all morons, the lot of them, and this might have caused the human race to die out had Mother Nature not robbed teenage girls of any sense of reason or perspective. They love teenage boys so blindly that it doesn't matter how awful they are.
Now, these intense first relationships aren't going to last. The boy is so freaked out by the intensity of the girl that he wants to escape, or the girl wants a boy to live up to the pedestal that she has put him on. Either way, these things rarely last beyond the teenage years, which is all well and good. The woman learns not to love so deeply, to keep her distance, and she becomes wiser and more alluring and more marvellous. But the boy, he not only learns nothing but he assumes that what happened was normal, because that relationship is all he knows. He thinks, 'well, the fact that I was worshipped must simply be because I am *exceptional*. I'm some kind of rock star poet.' And, he assumes, other women will think so too. So he goes through life, relationship after relationship, not being worshipped by saner, wiser women, and eventually cracks at some point in his forties. He has his mid-life crisis and tries to fuck girls that are far too young for him, just because they might activate that poor withering collection of neurons that still think being worshipped is part and parcel of a healthy relationship.
Actually scratch that, [Music is] not like a drug. It *is* a drug. It's something that you take to change how you're feeling. It's a mood changer, it's uppers or downers. It triggers emotions that you shouldn't really be experiencing at that point. It's fake, ultimately, fake emotions. Or at the very least, emotions that someone else is having for you. Too much of it does you no good at all.
Graeme was pushing the conversation towards the awkward zone, the no-go area that we'd avoided during the rest of the journey. Should we go there now? It was a good a time as any. If scabs are not meant to be picked, then why are they so eminently pick-able?
I had lost my respect for rationality long ago. The intellect is not the tool for discerning the future, it never has been and it never will be. It ranks somewhere behind random guessing and answering every question with the statement 'It'll be fine.' Personally I try to rely on gut instinct.
Chapter 37.
1. If you apply meaning to a thing you have made, then you have art.
2. If you apply meaning to a person, then you have love.
3. If you apply meaning to the universe, then you have God.
4. There is an inexhaustible supply of meaning.
5. Meaning costs nothing.
6. So what's the problem again?
7. *The wise man says, 'But meaning comes and goes. Sometimes it is there, sometimes it is not. That's just how it is. I wish things were different but they are not.'*
8. *'Once you accept that, we can move on to the little matter of the meaning of meaning.'*
Blue, green, brown or grey.
And how do we know? We just see it. We see it in their eyes. And it is that moment of recognition that forms our memory. Those eyes. We remember those eyes. Be they blue, green, brown or grey.
The sea is the colour of eyes, in all their variations. It changes to match everyone in turn. Every shade in its repertoire matches someone somewhere, and if you wait long enough it will eventually become the colour of the eyes which have looked at you with love.
I saw that all events on that road existed regardless of whether I had already passed through them, or whether I had yet to experience them. They were like the roads we had driven on and the towns we had passed through on our journey round the coast. We were at the bottom of Cornwall, yet everywhere we had travelled still existed, from Portmeirion to the Hill O'Many Stanes, from Blackpool to Brighton. So did every road in between, every yard, every inch. Time was no different. It was all there, eternal. Every last second.
We think that this world is ours, don't we? We think that it's the planet of people, and that people do stuff like making music. This world isn't ours. Music was here a long time before we arrived. It was here before we recorded, or wrote it down as a score, or danced to the drums around the communal fire. The birds sang before we did, and the whales before them. It will continue long after you or I have gone. It will continue after mankind has gone. Those cockroaches will make some amazing sounds. We are temporary. Music is not.