Travel light
Said a note on my Ayurveda tea bag
Two short words with a grand meaning, and I pondered over them while getting lost in a wonderful quartier Panier, in an old part of Marseilles.
A great place to evaluate life's baggage and plan for a lighter future
This is where Kundera's thoughts on lightness met yogi and united they rest in an old French geography book
I found this note over a year ago in the London Review Bookshop, just down the way from the British Museum, in a copy of Kundera. I was with the young woman who, at the time, had just led me to what I thought was a pathway of lightness. For her, I abandoned a promise of marriage to someone else, someone who wanted me to choose weight over lightness. Instead, I chose what I thought was careless love, and to that love I gave my soul. It was finding this note that caused me to read Kundera at all, because she said to me, "Now you have to buy it", and I did.
ReplyDeleteBy love's bitter mystery and culminating paradox, however, that lightness turned to stone, for she became the other half of me. I found that the very thing I had turned my back on, the weight, was the thing I desired most in the world. It was to be alone with her that I found myself wanting to be pulled down, even to the depths of the world. I was granted that wish, and for her I fell to earth, moved home, took a job, and worked at it diligently.
She left me a month ago today, suddenly. We had talked of our love like a revolution; we were both political science majors. It was a very Soviet style transformation from People's Hero to Non-person for reasons never understood. If it was our revolution, then I was Danton, remarking that, like Saturn, the revolution has devoured its own children, and she was Robespierre, assembling a Jacobin coterie for my execution. The blade fell, as it were, about a year and a half after I found this book with her and felt the weight of her fingers entwined with mine for the first time.
Now I am inconsequential. Free, plain and simple, but, yet, I am not lightness.
I looked at the note again today, and realized I had never pondered which condition I would choose. You, kind author, indicated your choice: lightness. You drank it in tea form, and it seems you looked to it as a shibboleth in your future travels. I wouldn't disagree, given the nauseating vertigo I suffer because, to quote Auden, I am now living "in freedom by necessity". Indeed, I often long for that same sensation, a beneficent and impervious in-consequence that marked my youth; the sense of saying yes only to those things that were, and not to those things that wanted me to stay put in abstract purposes.
Yet, though loathe to disagree with you, for all that I've had, quietly, in that Soviet love she gave to me, and for all that it is that still batters my heart, I would chose that weight and that hand in mine. That was my choice, weight, even without realizing it, and I realize (latent) that I was truly happy, deeply and beyond words, for a time. I leave it to you to make your own conclusions.
I hope your travels beyond Marseilles were light and free from baggage.
-The Recipient, Formerly of London