After journeying from one reader to another, this Sting autobio I could not afford to buy when it came out is finally in my bookshelf, thanks to Regiedor's charity. RP who has read it swears it's a superbly written book - not a phrase wasted, not a word carelessly placed. If Sting were a tailor, RP analogizes, his work wouldn't show a thread hanging loose. But Sting is no tailor, he's ex-husband #1.
An old interview flashed back with his sardonic humor in total display, poking fun at people undergoing hypnosis. After snapping out of neverland, he noted that everybody usually claims to be part of the Russian tsar family or some noble lineage in their past lives. How come, he dared, nobody confesses to be a louse in Rasputin's beard or a door knob in some Victorian castle. I am not sure if this anecdote is in this book, I am just in Chapter 2.
Past life. A topic of a recent conversation is the exact opposite: reincarnation. How shall you design the next life?
(1) Since I am a fetishist in this current life, I want to be a physicist in the next. I've said this a thousand and one times - gifted with ample intelligence, I would have majored in Physics, not PolSci.
(2) To be a monogamist polygot and be able to freely converse with cabdrivers in their native tongue and read T. Mann and other non-English writers in their original texts. For the monogamist part, to be able to clasp hands and stare intently at a Beloved in whatever terrain, frontier, hill we are perched on.
This is where my imagination falters - the crucial meeting of paths, the conjucture by which one comprehends that kismet is neither an hour early or an hour delayed. Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood for Love," is one of the most sensuous, languorous movies that compounded my inarticulateness on the where-and-when conjectures of love in full bloom.
There's a paragraph, however, in Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" that I jotted down in an old journal that describes this spellbinding moment of recognition which shall be sharply instructive I suppose, in the next life: "It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of reassurance that you may come across 4 or 5 times in life. It concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you, that at your best, you hoped to convey."
If that human being is already in your life, give thanks for this precious gift. The rest of us are enticed to look towards the horizon of an afterlife.
(3) Be a great ballerina or just to be able to dance, period.
Is this too much to hope for?
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