因为爱情。

某人写着:

我们常常会这样。。。
某天某个陌生的地方不经意间耳边回荡熟悉的音乐。忽然潸然泪下。因为音乐里有你的身影。听听那时我们的爱情。我们，一直都是在输给时间。去年我们曾牵手走过很多地方，在车站拥抱。一起看电影，往彼此的嘴巴里塞零食和饮料。一起幻想明年的这个时候，甚至是很多很多年以后，我们在干嘛，要干嘛。 可是感情的脆弱我们谁也想不到。这一秒幸福，下一秒就可以崩溃。恋情，崩盘起来，往往太措手不及。 再多的甜言蜜语，累积起来也敌不过分手两个字。
因为爱情！勾起了我们关于爱情的所有的记忆和感动！
因为爱情不会轻易悲伤，所以一切都是幸福的模样！
因为爱情怎么会有沧桑，所以我们还是年轻的模样！
后来的我们。明白了人间悲欢离合，欢聚离散。。。
因为爱情。。。因为你。。。

Of love and solitude.

"It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is—: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent—?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough."

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I will hold you close to my heart; I will let you go.
And I will protect your solitude, always.

"...we could hurt each other even when we weren't trying to,
and that none of us was as perfect as we liked to pretend."

—Meg Waite Clayton (via A Sea of Quotes)

You see, a writer doesn't pretend to be a saint but that does not mean he is entirely a sinner. If he cannot live his life certainly then he cannot write anything of substance. Is it worth it? I ask you: is it worth it, knowing that the man you love cannot return it in the way you would have liked, but still you cannot help feeling a certain tenderness towards him, even as you despise yourself for it? And then you watch him crash and burn, but each time he comes back smiling like a sweet young boy, grime on his face and flashing white teeth, and you melt once more upon seeing that twinkle in his eyes. But the years will take a toll on all of us—and your love may not die completely, but it will be preserved like a pressed flower; and the boy may not become a man entirely, but the twinkle in his eyes will be long gone.

Go watch J. Edgar.

This morning as I lay in a bed with eyes half-opened, and through a thin veil of curtain languidly watching the light from outside dispersed into a hundred little geometries through the frosted window; as I cautiously pulled the thick sheets over my naked torso, taking care not to interrupt the peaceful snores beside me; and slowing my breathing to a tedium—I thought of the baseness which I allowed myself after months of self-restraint, all because I wanted to know what it feels again as how you must have felt, knowing that you are craved, wanted, capable of stirring desire in others, capable of an easy tryst like a cheap prostitute. But one thing differentiates the two of us: I am certain of my immorality, and I can accept it. Which is why I decided, on my way home, how important it is to write about it, even if it is nothing glorious. And he told me that I'm different; and I agree I'm different—I understand the world, I do not grasp. He said he could see me as a father. I agree too. But that road is no longer open to me. I have gone to Hell.

"What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid."
—Sylvia Plath (via A Sea of Quotes)

Then one must always remind himself not to see 'too deep and too much'. But when all this is over, if I have not become something... Dust in the wind, the empty song of a billion men.

... And he can hold her hand; but he can never hold her heart.

How strange the way Fate toys with us. Tell me, Loner, are you writing stories with your life too? You must be strong then—you must survive everything you shall come to face in order to write that epic. It is your own story, like Tidus', and you must be strong enough to change your flawed world. How strange the way Fate plays with us—but perhaps, you will succeed where I'm fumbling.

The nagging feeling: what if I turned out to be a dilettante after all?

And the man would rather be damned together than to be in a paradise without him. You say love redeems everything; I say he who is willing to go to hell is the one who understands its true face.

"Is there really such a thing as love?" the boy found himself questioning. Soon, he grew up into a man and one day remembered the question he once asked as a boy. Having tasted what fruits the world could offer him over the years, he concluded that there is love, but it is for the lucky ones who found it, held on to it, and nurtured it into a strong tree. With love, he thought, you only get one chance to make good. After that, what keeps coming back with every new face isn't love; it is only the need for redemption: he who finally wins a heart will be absolved of all his past.

But it's true—I am a monster, only pretending to be human.

The difficult thing is to admit that over the course of development, one has ended up tragically flawed and simply not cut out for the rigours of a normal life. But reality is real, so somehow he must find himself a way of living in this world, even as he cannot be fully assimilated into it.

I shouldn't be up now since I have to wake in four hours' time, but this happens to be one of those nights when the mind decides to consume itself. Two hours spent flipping on the bed seemed like an eternity; and no amount of bashing the head against the pillow helped towards an earlier concussion. Camus' words rang loudly: "Have you never had a sudden need for sympathy, for help or for friendship? Of course you have. I have learned to make do with sympathy. It is easier to come by and it carries no commitment. Friendship is not so easy: it's long and hard to win, but when it's there, you can't get rid of it, you have to make do." Sympathy, even you are on a break tonight. It is no wonder the old English lady committed suicide in the end after noting everyday: "Today, nobody came." There'll be cake to eat at training later, to celebrate the birthdays of those born in January and February. I feel proud of myself for buying a strawberry shortcake. Yet at the same time I worry it is too small—it is probably just right for fifteen people but there will be twenty going tomorrow. Do you know that people kill themselves over such trivial matters? In fact, it is usually over the most trivial of matters that one decides to die. A character who kills herself because the cake she bought is not big enough for twenty people: that's ingenious. And people, they do not see how they are the ones responsible for her death. If only they had promptly replied to her invitation. Now she's dead because the cake is not enough for everyone.

"Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up."

—Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I have one too, of course, but I cannot say with certainty what it is. These days I spend my hours researching on and sketching dragons with the seriousness of an artist—doesn't matter if no one pays me to do it. I read up on brand identity and pore through hundreds of logos—doesn't matter if it isn't real work. I scribble in secret notebooks for my own joy—doesn't matter if they will never be read. I take bus rides to town to buy books and have coffee—doesn't matter if I've only four dollars left in my bank account. But I still wonder why I turned out like this. Perhaps there is meaning to an epic mediocrity after all.

So the book cannot be anything less than epic; its characters anything more than ordinary.

The Modern Hamlet: How Clichés Killed the Language

To be, or not to be: that is, like, the question:
Whether 'tis, like, nobler in the mind to, like, suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or, you know, to, like, take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, like, end them?

I realise that after a time, it becomes disgusting to repeat the story of my life. So it's true that I've had an unconventional way of doing things and every stranger who comes along and listens to it finds it 'interesting' but I start to wonder if it is that special after all. What does it matter to them anyway—it is not as if they were there every step of the way experiencing the same emotions and angst and difficulties of another man's life. What makes us so important, I think, is because we cannot see and feel past ourselves. That is why we can still be proud of who we are despite our failures and eccentricities and humiliating ways, and judge others as losers or misfits by that very measure. Holden Caulfield, if only you knew what a hero you are.

"If you want to know the truth, I don't know what I think about it. I'm sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Once, I really enjoyed our little conversation over coffee about life. We talked for three hours without realising it. And each time when we have to part ways, a certain sadness always fills my being: what is good must inevitably end somewhere, and I wonder when we'll get to talk like that again, and if we'll feel the same happiness the next time. But between now and then, we always seem to be pulled apart by circumstances and our foolish egos. If only we could give each other a chance, save each other from ourselves. But I suppose we're still young about such things, so the best thing to do I guess is to wish you the best, my Friend, and let you go.

And in the end the man realises that life, with all its complications and difficulties and misses and regrets, turns out exactly the way he wanted it to be; but he is an old man now, and such is the price of wisdom. But surely, he muses, if life had turned out otherwise, this day too might not have come? Indeed, indeed, you old man—the game, too, is a game.

"Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person."

—David Foster Wallace (via Booklover)

And I've been thinking, perhaps it's time to apply myself back in school.

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth." —Fyodor Dostoevsky

Yes, I think I haven't been seeing things in the right perspective after all, from an inflated view of how we are connected in some way in this world. Step back, step back; and the illusion disperses. I was young Werther, unworthy of Lotte. I wish I had never read this book that mimics my present situation in life; but if I hadn't I might have ended up like poor Werther, dead and unloved and unpitied.

But people, they don't yet know how words have the ability to cut into each other's hearts like a knife in the dark. I once killed a man in my naiveté; now it is my destiny to be the bearer of wounds. Be strong, don't die—I tell myself everyday.

Nothing harsher than the sudden need for friendship, but one cannot be sure if one is being demanding on people's time. Loneliness always wins in the end; and in the end, someday at the very end, death to a man who doesn't know who to turn to.

In the end,

I couldn't speak like my life depended on it.