Member-only story

Subway Diary

novalis
2 min readJun 13, 2018

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You survive, you pay your rent, your bills, but so what? What are you trying to make it to the next day for? It’s totally unclear. The will to live is like an engine idling in the snow. Nothing is self-evident or clear; nothing can be taken for granted. There are no values, no ideals. No facts. Just chaos. Nothing can be fixed into place. You can’t play God with your inner-life, your perceptions, your character. It all slides and sloshes around; shifts like quicksilver shifts according to the temperature.

Creativity offers hope, but only because it is a part of chaos, and not a resistance to it. Creativity brings you in line with chaos; plunges you into it.

Photo by Mervyn Chan on Unsplash

I am almost 30 years old: I know only marginally more about myself than I did a decade ago when I turned 20. At best, I’m a little more patient — a little less reactive.

I used to think that the furnace of my interiority only burned truth. But I realize that you can fuel it with lies just as easily.

Getting older just teaches you to be skeptical about the progress (or lack thereof) of your own soul.

I have to retrain myself to write by hand — to get into the practice of always carrying a notebook with me in my back pocket, or jacket pocket, or backpack. To always have my pen ready at hand. My old smartphone (now discarded) destroyed my best habits.

Time is a desert. Each day is a search for the water of eternity.

“Sun setting over the Muscat horizon, casting shadows on the ripples of the desert sand dunes” by Giorgio Parravicini on Unsplash

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