The Woolfian monologue and the Kafkaesque time. A fork of cake to a hundred buzzings of the mind. A cacophany of voices, sizzling milk steamers, dinging bells, wooden chairs dragging across wooden floorboards, chachinking tills. Out of the chaos in her ears a rhythm builds up in her mind.

"Don't love a poet," said he. "His incompleteness and incompetence will wear you out. His days, too dark, only shot through occasionally by a grand radiance; and like the weather nothing about him is predictable, is consistent."

"But I don't," said she. "It is true that I have loved many poets—Blake, Wordsworth, Rilke—and you are right. They are incomplete: they cannot complete me. They cannot complete me as a man in flesh would; as you, standing here with me, alive, would. I can love words on a page; but a heart, that's divine poetry."

"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 Wake.

Colours. Blue. White. Black. Yellow. Orange. Red. Gold. Sounds. Chants. Music. Trumpets. Cymbals. Shuffling feet. Chatter. Big noisy fans. Plastic wrappers and tablecloths caught in the wind. Smell. Incense. Flowers - what type? Sandalwood. Grass after rain. Sight. The coffin. The body. The people. The priests. The paper house. The set of clothes dressed over a chair. Touch. Wood. Plastic bags. Paper plates. Joss sticks. Emotion. Solemn. Laughter. Tears. Silent strength. And when all this is over, what shall we do?

Perspective, perspective...

All of a sudden I realise that the book is too linear. It goes from A to B to C to D, Sunday to Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday, two o'clock to three o'clock to four to five. That wasn't the intention, no no no. And then the distance one feels with the characters. It focuses too much on Damien (yes, a name at last!) but the thing is not to make one stand out too much. Everyone is a main character in some way and then no one is the main character. What crazy ideas, coming from a budding writer! Before this is over I will have thrown ten jotter books into the bin, I am sure.

"There are times when I very much want to say: 'take my hand, let us go together, let me show you this other world filled with love.' But I cannot, not yet. You haven't fully understood the pain of your loneliness, nor the true value of love which is not always sweet and is capable of plunging one's heart into a thousand darknesses just to love one being. And only when you have understood these things and more, then you'll begin to find people who really matter. But not before. Before, my love for you will only be wasted and you will not win any wisdom for yourself. So go, because I too had to go through it. But when you come back one day, if you did not come to hate me first, know that I have always kept this space in my heart for you. It is yours and you would complete me if you fill it."

The work, the work...

I haven't touched my work for so long. Even as it goes unwritten so many experiences in the recent months have added new layers to it. But enough—a man must do his work in the end. I talk so much about it that I spend more time talking about it. And so I see that the first will be written this year, because the practical truth is that I am running out of income as well. It is good, life: it forces you to the edge of desperation and, having no time or recourse left, to action.

A few thoughts:

Two parts, three families, three primary characters.

A funeral scene, the wake.

A young boy sitting in the middle of the train station, crying in his folded arms. Everyone walks past him. Only the young man goes up to him and offers a tissue and a light pat on his shoulder.

His nurturing instinct, like he wants to protect all the helpless children in the world.

In the end, to love another being entirely, he realises that he can stand next to C as equals, not as a guardian.

And when all this is over: more work. I already have ideas for two more books. But first, this work, this book...

His notebook is half-filled with the things he wants to say and write about, but nothing that he has actually written. The man feels a hunger rise in his belly—I can do this, he says, I will do this—but the pencil lay untouched beside an empty pad on his desk. The memories, they make his spirit swell and surge and wet his eyes, but he does not cry. Patience, he tells himself. Endure. And so once more he begins in his head:

"One morning at two o'clock, a young man appeared on the empty street and started walking home."

Reading List of 2011.

Books I have completed:

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby
2. J. D. Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye
3. Homer — The Odyssey
4. Albert Camus — The First Man
5. Albert Camus — The Rebel
6. Albert Camus — The Myth of Sisyphus
7. Albert Camus — The Stranger
8. Albert Camus — The Fall
9. Albert Camus — Notebooks
10. Michael Cunningham — A Home at the End of the World
11. John Steinbeck — Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters
12. John Steinbeck — Working Days
13. James Joyce — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
14. Hermann Hesse — Steppenwolf
15. Hermann Hesse — Siddhartha
16. Colin Wilson — The Outsider
17. Alexander Pushkin — Eugene Onegin
18. Orhan Pamuk — The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
19. Jack Kerouac — On The Road
20. Jack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums
21. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg — The Letters
22. J. W. v Goethe — Faust, Part I
23. J. W. v Goethe — The Sorrows of Young Werther
24. Jean-Paul Sartre — Nausea
25. Nikolai Gogol — The Diary of a Madman
26. Jon Krakauer — Into the Wild
27. Philip Jeyaretnam — Abraham's Promise
28. A. A. Milne — Winnie-the-Pooh

Books I have not completed:

1. Irving Stone — Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh
2. Homer — The Iliad
3. Louis-Ferdinand Céline — Journey to the End of the Night
4. Hermann Hesse — Peter Camenzind
5. Milan Kundera — The Unbearable Lightness of Being
6. Fyodor Dostoyevsky — The Idiot
7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Crime and Punishment
8. Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Notes from Underground
9. Leo Tolstoy — War and Peace
10. Ayn Rand — We the Living
11. Italo Calvino — The Complete Cosmicomics
12. John Steinbeck — The Grapes of Wrath
13. Susan Sontag — Against Interpretation and Other Essays
14. Virginia Woolf — To the Lighthouse
15. James Joyce — Ulysses
16. James Joyce — Finnegans Wake
17. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — Wind, Sand and Stars
18. Ernest Hemingway — The Old Man and the Sea
19. Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
20. T. E. Lawrence — The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
21. E. M. Forster — A Room with a View
22. André Malraux — Man's Fate
23. Marcel Proust — In Search of Lost Time vol. 1: Swann's Way
24. George Orwell — Essays
25. Albert Camus — Exile and the Kingdom: Stories
26. Albert Camus — The Plague
27. Albert Camus — Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
28. Franz Kafka — Metamorphosis and Other Stories
29. Kobo Abe — The Woman in the Dunes
30. Ernesto Che Guevara — The Motorcycle Diaries
31. Henry David Thoreau — Walden

Thoughts from a Notebook.

The mother and father who have to learn from scratch, from nothing. Equally they suffer in a silence like their son.

The things we do, we do them because we're now adults and we can.

Nostalgia: a return to his childhood home, standing from afar, observing the strangers living in it. Do they share what he feels about it?

The streets are always too bright, even at night. He couldn't hide his shame anywhere. Everywhere he went it was for all to see and he despised himself because he too could see himself.

Chekhov: "It is not glory that is essential for the writer... it is the patience to endure." "To carry his cross and keep hope."

Camus: "Everyone wants the man who is still searching to have reached his conclusions."

The secret life lived in darkness. The man who always appears in darkness or has an aura of darkness around him.

The mother who buys a cup of hot drink from the vending machine; the son's shame at witnessing it from afar.

Even a life of inconsistencies is consistent in that sense.

The man visits the same café every afternoon. He would order a strong black coffee and sit at the table in the corner. He would look into his cup, stir the dark liquid slowly with the teaspoon, and think. Then, after a while, he would open a book and read for an hour or two. He is not like the other patrons. Mostly they go in pairs or more, and their tables are always filled with laughter and chatter, but he is always alone, always quiet, with a book. Last week, he was reading The Great Gatsby; today, he begins Journey to the End of the Night. The afternoon would go by. Then, when he is done, he would close his book lightly, quietly clear his empty cup, and leave. Nobody knows him, he doesn't say goodbye to anyone, he doesn't even leave an echo of himself as others do when they stand up to go and push their chairs noisily across the floor.

Also, on the topic of cafés:

"And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday:
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café."

—Joni Mitchell (via A Poet Reflects)

But if one were able to read minds, one would discover that human beings are not dead. There is so much going on in our heads—on this I assume that we all can think—but we don't make them all happen. I drink my coffee in silence as I think about how I'd be a hero and all fighting crime or just telling the lady who cut everyone's queue to queue up. But I let it slip. I let life slip by. We let life slip by. If only we would be strong enough—because we are. If only we would make this day less ordinary.

I needed a young painter ... who would awaken me. —Gertrude Stein

...Art cannot live before devotion. It is one thing to create and another to create something alive, which is only achievable when the artist channels his energies from an experience, object or person which has moved him deeply, into his work. There are too many people who would readily proclaim themselves artists because their work involve creation or creativity. It is a misleading fad of the present times that drives too many people to want to become artists, but the truth is that any work is a potential masterpiece and anyone who toils with the right attitude is an artist at work...

The man did an amazing thing today: he walked twenty kilometers home. "I can die a happy man now." But tomorrow comes, nothing spectacular happens, and he does not die.

He pledged devotion to his friend, another man. "Stop it. It's unacceptable." "To be capable of love, one must accept damnation." The friend, a Christian, never talked to him again.

Also, Camus: ...a holy man who has lived his whole life in sin (never partaking of Communion, not marrying the woman with whom he lived) because, unable to endure the idea that a single soul was damned, he wanted to be damned too.

He was grateful towards her for she wanted to love him, but it was something he could not allow her to do. Thus, he chose to avoid looking into her eyes; but once, when he caught them by chance, he saw a sadness and felt a tenderness for her. It would become something he will always associate her with, which he could not speak of to protect her purity from his taint.

After A died, he felt a change in him. He felt capable of devoting himself to A's parents like a son they always had. The first months were easy; after that, he needed to get away from them, because everyone was crumbling inside but nobody could talk about it to anybody. One day, he stopped visiting them altogether.

The priority is art: devotion to myself and what I can create. That does not mean it will be right. Either way, it will be my rock to carry through my life. Mine alone.

In writing, it is no good to begin from a word processor, chiefly because one does not feel the words like how one comes to understand them in longhand. And the worse thing: using the wrong typeface.

The working man.

The man always excuses himself at the last moment. Today I will write my book, he feels. But he mostly never does. When he is supposed to meet his friends the next time his guilt makes him excuse himself once again. I've work to do, and he says nothing more.

The wretched writer.

It is always easier to read than to write a book; to play than to develop a game. These are the easier things to do no doubt, but these things are not mine. In the end, after reading a good book, say, 'The Myth of Sisyphus', those ideas still belong to Camus. What then are my ideas? What is my story?

Why do I even want to write the story? Does it matter whether it gets told? What do I want out of it?

It doesn't matter—nothing does. So why bother? Why why why? Indeed, why bother about anything at all. The sound and the fury. Much ado about nothing. It probably means nothing at all.

Then I filled another page-and-a-half on his childhood, and wondered if I am not a wretch.

On work, and what life is.

Without warning the work has begun. On Wednesday I filled a page-and-a-half of a blank jotter book with details of his childhood. On Thursday I did not have the mood to write anything. Instead I spent the day reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. It is truly a beautiful story, and as I read I remembered those insights that once came to me and those that Adrian once shared with me, and there they are, all in the book too. Often, when I encounter stories that mimic situations in my life, I would be amused by a sense of illusion about reality, as if my life were created from these stories and I was to read them someday. I would then wonder if I am not a character in a book as well, reading a story about one who resembles myself, and is in turn a writer working on a novel using experiences from his life. Such depths it can go to! Yet life cannot be a book, for if it were then the author must be a very bad writer to have included all sorts of insignificant fillers, details such as hanging out every single piece of laundry to dry, or brushing the teeth everyday.

So one does his work on some days, and does not on some other days. Man is neither greater nor lesser in that way. There are lives, and then there are great books about people's lives, but it is not the same between reading about one and living one.