This time, I was awake.
I didn't feel it so much now. But yesterday morning, rising alone in my mother's bed, I shook off the reeds of sleep and felt my heart sink. It's me who is sinking, I thought. Fear and doubt have woven their wicked way into my soul. Even so, another voice answered, never give up.
"Modern architecture is apologetic," someone said last night. It touched me and many others. Because there was the truth of it, staring us all in the face each time we saw a Renaissance dome and then a Bauhaus factory in the same mental breath. We knew it, but it had never been put into words. Not so fully, in such a way that creates new thoughts.
I began to consider the West's lost pride, the dilution of cultures, complacent lovers. People who say sorry all the time, but who are supposed to be great. Sorry for the war. Sorry for the famine. How the word 'sorry' tampers with greatness. To a Frenchman, a 'sorry-sorry-sorry' sprouting Englishman seems both weak and an idiot.
I stopped. Appreciated something else. The big thing: someone else's words had liberated me. I was not dominated by another's too-brilliant argument or resorting to build a teetering annex from their ideological empire. I had been sufficiently fed to run off on my own and build a universe. My own. And build it from truth, so as a by-product, my soul became visible to me in a display more lasting and much greater than the glimpse of my reflection in the mirror - another, much easier way of seeking self that never leaves me inspired but guilty at the evidence of my hopeless vanity.
I felt something alight inside my head. But it came from every part of me. Deep enough to make me want to defend each thought to the death, because I had infinite belief in all of them when they came from that place. I had infinite time and energy to make them more understood.
The enormity of that.
I didn't feel it so much now. But yesterday morning, rising alone in my mother's bed, I shook off the reeds of sleep and felt my heart sink. It's me who is sinking, I thought. Fear and doubt have woven their wicked way into my soul. Even so, another voice answered, never give up.
"Modern architecture is apologetic," someone said last night. It touched me and many others. Because there was the truth of it, staring us all in the face each time we saw a Renaissance dome and then a Bauhaus factory in the same mental breath. We knew it, but it had never been put into words. Not so fully, in such a way that creates new thoughts.
I began to consider the West's lost pride, the dilution of cultures, complacent lovers. People who say sorry all the time, but who are supposed to be great. Sorry for the war. Sorry for the famine. How the word 'sorry' tampers with greatness. To a Frenchman, a 'sorry-sorry-sorry' sprouting Englishman seems both weak and an idiot.
I stopped. Appreciated something else. The big thing: someone else's words had liberated me. I was not dominated by another's too-brilliant argument or resorting to build a teetering annex from their ideological empire. I had been sufficiently fed to run off on my own and build a universe. My own. And build it from truth, so as a by-product, my soul became visible to me in a display more lasting and much greater than the glimpse of my reflection in the mirror - another, much easier way of seeking self that never leaves me inspired but guilty at the evidence of my hopeless vanity.
I felt something alight inside my head. But it came from every part of me. Deep enough to make me want to defend each thought to the death, because I had infinite belief in all of them when they came from that place. I had infinite time and energy to make them more understood.
The enormity of that.
