Nothing to Give, All Yours
The particularity of the light this afternoon, a flat, bruised grey that promises nothing, delivers less, catches the dust motes dancing just above the polished sheen of the desk. They are the only movement in this still room, and they hold my attention with a quiet, mesmerizing futility. One is always looking for a pattern, a structure, some clean line of cause and effect in the vast, fluid mess of living, and today I have found the simplest one: I have nothing to give and it’s all yours.
The statement isn't a gesture of generosity; it's a cold, hard fact of depletion, like a well gone dry. It’s an abdication. Take the emptiness. Take the silence. Take the exhausted plain of my mind, scoured clean of any interesting observation or generous impulse. I have already spent the currency on the simple, ongoing mechanics of the day (the small, irritating friction of existence). Whatever is left, the debris, the residue, it’s yours. A pathetic little inheritance.
And then there is the peculiar problem of the self-referential document. The notebooks I keep encountering, the blogs, the endless parade of the I and the me, a genre of writing that seems to orbit exclusively around the author’s own emotional landscape, their delicate triumphs, their minor, meticulously cataloged distress. I flip through the pages, and it is all interior weather. A closed loop.
It makes me wonder, with a kind of detached, anthropological curiosity, what happens to the world when it is filtered only through the prism of a single, highly sensitized ego. Do they truly not see the indifferent, terrible beauty of the non-self? The way the shadows fall on the pavement? The relentless, grinding momentum of a city that does not know their name, or care?
I am not calling them a narcissist. That is a judgment, and judgments require a kind of energy I simply do not possess. But damn. It is a stunning feat of concentration, an almost heroic act of editing, to excise everything outside the frame of one's own skin. It suggests a profound and perhaps necessary myopia. They write about themselves because, perhaps, that is the only thing they can reliably see. The rest of us are left to observe, from a distance, the rigorous, exhausting maintenance of that small, brightly lit stage, and to note the strange way the light, in all its devastating neutrality, seems to hit everything else.