Monday, May 17, 2004
My troubles with Resolution
So I was watching this movie yesterday night. This Jewish family flees from Nazi Germany to live in Kenya, on a farm in the middle of nowhere. I watch in awe as the aristocratic wife adapts to a simple life. I feel enchanted as the husband learns to hunt and dig wells. My heart swells. I am positive now. THIS is how I should be living! Until the moment I fall asleep everything seems to make sense. I should quit the stress of my metropolitan life and flee to a farm myself. Happiness is possible with so little. And after all what’s all the fuss about? Why do I need a bigger TV or a car that reaches 180 mph? I weigh the pros and cons, and can’t make myself reach a different conclusion! To a farm I go. I ponder how to convince my wife, calculate needed expenses and…eventually I fall asleep.
In the morning, the alarm clock rings at seven thirty. As I brush my teeth, I have a vague remembrance of the previous night’s project. It takes less then five minutes of cool reasoning to crash down the logic of the feverish planning. My regular (mediocre?) life resumes.
“And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.”
In the morning, the alarm clock rings at seven thirty. As I brush my teeth, I have a vague remembrance of the previous night’s project. It takes less then five minutes of cool reasoning to crash down the logic of the feverish planning. My regular (mediocre?) life resumes.
“And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.”
Baldwhat????
All I ever wanted was to have a big family and spend quality time with my kids, while keeping passionate about my wife and, of course, making loads of money at work. I also wanted to become a famous writer and a nobel laureate for physics after which I would roam the world lonely going to places beyond the reach of tourists. I wanted to be a school teacher in a small town, I wanted to live four years with Yanomami indians in the Amazon forest and I wanted to be the owner and manager of a small hotel in Provence. In the meantime I would be satisfied if I could find the cure for cancer.
Too much to ask?
Not if I were Baldanders, a creature in time, who could be one thing in a given moment and something completely different in the next. Here is how Borges describes Baldanders:
Baldanders (whose name we may translate as Soon-another or At-any-moment-something-else) was suggested to the master shoemaker Hans Sachs (1494-1576) of Nuremberg by that passage in the Odyssey in which Menelaus pursues the Egyptian god Proteus, who changes himself into a lion, a serpent, a panther, a huge wild boar, a tree, and flowing water. Baldanders takes the forms of a man, of an oak tree, of a sow, of a fat sausage, of a field of clover, of dung, of a flower, of a blossoming branch, of a mulberry bush, of a silk tapestry, of many other things and beings, and then, once more, of a man; he also makes himself into a secretary and writes these words from the Revelation of St. John: "I am the first and the last." Baldanders is a successive monster, a monster in time. In his belt he carries a sword and in his hands an open book showing pictures of a crown, a sailing boat, a goblet, a tower, a child, a pair of dice, a foolscap with bells, and a piece of ordnance.*
Too much to ask?
Not if I were Baldanders, a creature in time, who could be one thing in a given moment and something completely different in the next. Here is how Borges describes Baldanders:
Baldanders (whose name we may translate as Soon-another or At-any-moment-something-else) was suggested to the master shoemaker Hans Sachs (1494-1576) of Nuremberg by that passage in the Odyssey in which Menelaus pursues the Egyptian god Proteus, who changes himself into a lion, a serpent, a panther, a huge wild boar, a tree, and flowing water. Baldanders takes the forms of a man, of an oak tree, of a sow, of a fat sausage, of a field of clover, of dung, of a flower, of a blossoming branch, of a mulberry bush, of a silk tapestry, of many other things and beings, and then, once more, of a man; he also makes himself into a secretary and writes these words from the Revelation of St. John: "I am the first and the last." Baldanders is a successive monster, a monster in time. In his belt he carries a sword and in his hands an open book showing pictures of a crown, a sailing boat, a goblet, a tower, a child, a pair of dice, a foolscap with bells, and a piece of ordnance.*
