Inside a bubble
So my Australian friend, who lives and works in the Netherlands, came to visit Paris this weekend. He’s the CTO of the Dominos chain in Amsterdam, so when I ironically suggested we order take-out from Dominos, he shot me an icy gaze that would have scaled well with Putin’s. He stayed at my place. He brought me stroopwafels which tasted heavenly.
I showed him Paris. We didn’t stop by the overly clichéd landmarks, mostly because he has already seen them. Hence, the tour Eiffel, the Arc de Triomphe and so on did not make the list. However, the schedule was filled with plain garden outings, museum queuing, and à-la-Venice wanderings.
The picture I took of Max is basically him scrolling through his iPhone in the buzzing Jardin of Luxembourg. This is where the current conventional debate about “technology reducing us to non-social, mildly introverted, highly-life-escapist individuals”comes to mind. But, really, who wants to hear/read about what is already quasi obvious. To each their personal balance through which they weigh the perks and drawbacks of technology. To each their tailored approach as to how they should make the best of it. For me, there is no conclusive decision that deems technology good or evil. So without delving into the abyss of what would make, in other circumstances, a good English college essay, I shall redirect the spotlight on the garden of Luxembourg itself.
Children running. One kid with an overly filled bladder could not hold it in anymore. Her father obviously did what was necessary, which in this case meant the immediate stripping of the little girl’s pants and holding her in a swing-like position while she relieved herself in public. The whole thing looked like an extra fountain, with the single exception that people passing by looked away upon noticing it, instead of stopping by to take pictures.
Leaves falling. The Eiffel tour peeking behind the canopy of the trees. The four-century old Medici fountain. The parallel tree-lined promenades opening to the view of the Luxembourg palace. Statues scattered here and there.
I had an eerie feeling when I imagined the garden without the people in it. Anguish engulfed me and wrapped me gently like the autumn breeze invading the Chinese lady’s spring dress. The grandiosity of nature hit me with the force of a cartoon anvil. Maybe living in this urban city accentuated that feeling. Maybe I was so accustomed to seeing the amorphous crowd wherever my feet guided me in Paris that I couldn’t imagine any place without it. Or maybe because the entire garden looked like it was specifically built to have people in it. Like a miniature, packed with details blueprint blown out of proportion by a 12-year old who learned how to use homothetic transformations. At that moment, I thought I would not want to be one of the personnel that checks the park for lost tourists before closing time. I was scared that the emptiness of the place would seep into my soul, devour my joys and sorrows until there was nothing left except a puny human shell devoid of expression and meaning. Then, all of a sudden, Jean Paul Sartre materialized on one of the benches. Well, not exactly him, but the idea of nihilism. And I started recalling his work, a book called Nausea I read a couple years back:
In the book, the solipsist protagonistAntoine Roquentin, gets bombarded by flares of nausea through which the layers of a tenuous reality crumble down behind veils of nihilism. A simple pebble would be enough to cause the nausea, sometimes a seat or a tree root, or even a glass of beer. Once the chain reaction starts, reality starts falling apart: things break free from their names and become hollow, meaningless:
“Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them… there is nothing.”
“But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which push one another along in disorder, and then, all of a sudden, revelations like this.”
Furthermore, when Roquentin sees the trees at the park, he dismisses their superfluity as “dismal, sickly, encumbered by itself”.
How wearisome to look at things through this clouded prism; how incredibly vain yet inexorable.
I cannot fathom why my mind raced with so many thoughts while Max was busy checking his e-mails. I began to see the world differently. I felt detached from it, denied by it. I felt I had to validate something in order for me to gain access to it.
I appreciated friendship at that moment and compared it to booze in the way it alleviates an aching mind overrun with existential compilations. One might argue that any activity that busies that who’s undertaking it may do the job. But unlike reading a book, interacting with a fellow human is a symmetric relationship that channels its own essence and dissipates, for a brief moment in time, distress.
“I hadn’t any right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant, a microbe. My life grew in a haphazard way and in all directions. Sometimes it sent me vague signals; at other times I could feel nothing but an inconsequential buzzing.”
The buzzing was always there. But having a friend in the journey somehow tuned its volume down a few decibels.
