"Mario,

what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”

-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

I am a different person now than I was when I left home in July.

This is natural-- after all, I am a different person now than I was when I ate breakfast this morning—- but still, the scale is different. I’ll be home in a month and it’s strange to imagine that everything there will be, more or less, exactly as I left it. It will be good though. I miss home. It took me this long to realize, feel, or say that.

As for how I am different, I’m not exactly sure. I’m older, I know that much—- and better, too, I think. I have a better sense of who I am and what I want from life and I’m not sure why traveling for half a year helped me to figure that out, but it did.

I was leaving the subway earlier today, riding an escalator out of the subterranean gloom into the bright, early morning light, when I smelled banana block sunscreen. I couldn’t figure out where it came from; there was nobody near me. Still, I smelled it, and it took me back to when I was a kid and I would go with my family to Hilton Head every summer for vacation (crammed into the Volvo station wagon with the boogie boards lashed down against the roof for the interminable drive) and my parents would smother me in banana block so I could spend all day running around the tide pools with my little net trying to catch minnows [to then release] without getting sunburned.

I have this image of myself, I don’t know if it’s real or if I've picked it up from a photo since then-- I'm small and my brown hair is choppy against my forehead and I'm beaming into the camera with a gap between my two front teeth that won’t be fixed by braces for seven or eight years to come. And I don’t know what it is, the eyes I think, but I know I’m in there. I’m still thin—it’s before my chubby stage—and I’m wearing a plain red bathing suit. A silver cross that my grandfather had engraved with my initials and gave to me for my first communion hangs around my neck. Whenever I was nervous or bored I would put the cross in my mouth and bite down on it. It tasted how you would imagine it to taste, but it comforted me. I don’t know what has happened to it since then.

Anyways, after I smelled the banana block that whole picture came back, all of it, and it was strange to think about my childhood—- because that’s what it is now, my childhood. And it’s strange because to call it that implies distance, and the distance means that I am no longer there: I guess I’m not a kid anymore. Things were very different then. As kids we have so little perspective that everything simply is, in and of itself. I don’t think I could look at things that way anymore even if I wanted to (and sometimes I do). There’s too much other stuff that gets in the way-- like experience and manners and paradigms and worry and regret and hope, not to mention an expanded self-consciousness.

But then it was a clean slate. I remember how when we would walk down to the ocean my bare feet would burn against the concrete sidewalk and I would try to spot the little green lizards that would dart around the mulched gardens on the sides. I remember the night I was walking on the beach with my father and we saw the nest of baby turtles that had just hatched and were crawling impossibly slow down towards the white foam of the waves into which they would finally disappear. I remember the time my sister shut the hotel door on my thumb and the nail came off and how looking at my thumb without the nail made it hurt even more. But memory is a funny thing, because I don’t think any of those mental pictures were from the same vacation but somehow, in my brain, they’re all filed away in the same folder which has a picture of me in a red bathing suit on the cover.

So, I wonder, what will I think of that semester in college I spent in Spain? What picture will I see when I remember myself then (that is, to say, now)? There are the places I've been, and the friends I have, and there is definitely a girl involved. There’s the dinner with my host family that dissolved into us trying to catch grapes in our mouths and there’s the guy who sits outside that café on the corner, perennially smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer while he reads his book. There’s that one time when mostly sober I tried to see how high I could kick and fell on my ass. There's the subway I take and the streets I run and my Thursday beer after class with a plate of olives that make me feel sick after I eat too many. There are the beggars I recognize and there's just the right way to jiggle the key to open my lock and there are the thousand other little things that are meaningless in and of themselves. So what’s the cover of the folder? What's the picture of myself-- what will I be wearing and who will I be and will I be able to recognize a part of myself then in the eyes of who I am now? Maybe it’s a kid, no an adult, no a kid, looking into a mirror, trying to figure that question out.

Playboy: If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it is worth living?

Kubrick: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaningless of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism-- and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he's reasonably strong-- and lucky-- he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life's élan. Both because of an in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death-- however mutable man may be able to make them-- our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Prague:

"God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them." -Franz Kafka

You have been in cities too long.

You miss the open space of the United States. You miss being able to drive an hour to where you look off the road and see nothing but farm-lands and feed corn growing higher than a man can stand. You miss looking at the tiny house made of dirty white boards with a tractor out front and wondering who lives there. Wondering if he’s always lived there. Wondering if seeing a sky that open every morning makes you into a different kind of man than you’d be otherwise.

From the two-lane-highway as you pass by you will think about what it would be like to stand down there in that grown corn field in that breezy fall air and let your arms rest at your sides. You will think about what the smooth stalks and the rough leaves would feel like on the tips of your fingers. You will think about what the wind would sound like from down there, in the middle of it all.

Then, just once, without thinking about it and like it wasn’t your choice, you will pull onto the shoulder and stop the car and get out and go and see for yourself. You will feel stupid and awkward and strange and when a car passes while you’re walking down you’ll make sure they can’t see your face and you'll be relieved when they don't slow down or stop. It will not at all be how you imagined it. You will be afraid to walk in and then afraid to walk in too deep because you don’t want to get lost and also because you can’t see what else is in there. What could be in there? Nothing. Still, you feel uncomfortable, and you keep spinning around to check.

After a while you relax, just a bit, and decide to lie down. It is colder outside than you thought and the ground is a little bit damp but it is already too late and the seat of your pants are probably muddy. You lean back and first clasp your hands over your stomach but then put them behind your head and look up at the sky and the way the sun is coming through some heavy clouds. It’s later than you thought it was. There will be flies and they will be incredibly annoying—you won’t have imagined them at all because you only imagine flies when it's hot and sticky outside. Swatting won’t do anything and they will make your skin feel itchy even when they’re not there.

At one point a swallow will fly by overhead and then another chasing the first and you will be amazed by how fast they move and turn and dive. You will close your eyes for less than a minute, but then open them and look around again and check that nothing changed while they were closed. You will get bored but not want to be bored and the flies will keep bugging you. You will be chilly and decide the ground is definitely wet and you will sit up and bring your knees to your chest and stay like that for a while. Then you will decide you have to pee and you will stand up and look around another time before you unzip your pants. After, you will shake it superfluously, then you won’t really want to sit back down again but you won't be ready to go so you will stand there another moment and then decide to leave, not having found whatever you were looking for. You will walk back out and feel embarrassed and ashamed and will never tell another soul what you did because they, like you, will not understand. You will unlock the car and drive away.

In Bruges...

"Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud."

-Hermann Hesse