Mid-section of the day (from 12pm to 230pm)
Garish shops and sales girls
Round tables in a restaurant
Loud voice, glaring sound
Dyed hair, especially on Asians
Polyester fabrics
Combination of red and yellow
Dirty fingers
Stuffed
Plain, dowdy women
Timid men
Earnest men and women
Unqualified nicety
Unnecessary questions and chatty without wit
Emojis, typos, lack of digital decency
Chinglish, Konglish and Singlish
Colors (from very bright to very dusty)
Old trees, robust plants and unpretentious flowers (white orchid)
Natural fabrics — silk, linen, cotton, wool and cashmere
Halter top, maxi dress, satin chemise and long boots
The textual feel and ink smell of a book
A beautifully crafted sentence, and punchy short stories
A simple meal (with good company), or free flow brunch with anyone
Sparkling water
Champagne for breakfast
Iron Buddha, Old-fashioned, Burgundy Pinot Noir and Napa Cab
Early mornings and early evenings
Staring outside the window in a moving object
Certain Yoga positions — pigeon, tree, and plank
Shower after a good sweat
Chiseled male faces
Deep kisses
Frolicking in bed
Speaking of someone I love lightly
One would, if not always, want to live various lives. All art forms allow us to live vicariously. So well put by De Beauvoir —
“I’ve had what I wanted, and, when all is said and done, what one wanted was always something else. A woman psychoanalyst wrote me a very intelligent letter in which she said that “in the last analysis, desires always go far beyond the object of desire.” The fact is that I’ve had everything I desired, but the “far beyond” which is included in the desire itself is not attained when the desire has been fulfilled.”
“There is an emptiness in man, and even his achievements have this emptiness. That’s all. I don’t mean that I haven’t achieved what I wanted to achieve but rather that the achievement is never what people think it is. Furthermore, there is a naïve or snobbish aspect, because people imagine that if you have succeeded on a social level you must be perfectly satisfied with the human condition in general. But that’s not the case.”
Saw this from Gide — “the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are”, and was tempted to resume blogging. Rescue a few intelligible lines from the chaos of consciousness on a daily basis.
If I were younger, I’d greatly admire Simone Weil’s self-imposed moral rigor. In her “First and Last Notebooks”, she listed a score of “temptations to be read every morning”) in an (futile) effort to eradicate them. Poor thing! But that was exactly what I was in my 20s and early 30s. It’s both endearing and saddening to read her list: temptation of idleness (“by far the strongest”, she wrote), temptation of the inner life, allow yourself only those feelings which are actually called upon for effective use or else are required by thought for the sake of inspiration; temptation to dominate, temptation of perversity…
Ah. How ruthless to the self. Almost ouch! — that’s my current reaction.
But of coz I clearly remember still how I modeled (or tried to) myself after her great French contemporary de Beauvoir in my early years. Imposed draconian discipline on myself.
How did I manage to escape from all that? How have I come to feel much more deeply and closer about “non-struggle” ethos best manifested by Alan Watts, an almost antithesis to my adolescent heroines?
Is this the process of maturation?
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