I'm beginning to notice with more increasing regularity on this train all the people together: the couples, the families, the friends travelling together.
My eyes glaze over those alone--the commuters, the weekenders--and they focus on the relationships of those that know one another and illicit emotions. Perhaps because solitude is silence, my ears pricks at conversation and my eyes follow. It's usually the sound of love or joy or happiness, being carefree. I wonder if eyes glaze over me.
Maybe people see the way I see, or maybe I'm one in a million, and no one understands the constant fireworks in between my ears like Bastille Day, Sacha's birthday, on the fourteenth of July. It's curious that my oldest friends, both of them, were born on days of independence in July. There's probably a story in there somewhere, and I wish I just had a mountain of speed with which to write it down. With that, it wold only take days, smashing through the excavation. What would Steinbeck do with that motivation?
I like reading his journal, or I should say his collection of letters to his editor. Today he balked at Roger & Hammerstein's The King And I, calling it a thin show that covers it's thinness in luxury.
He said:
"I believe you can only be unafraid if you find what it is that you fear and you conquer it."
Not about The King And I, mind you, but about a more general kind of living.
*****
Whatever be the problem,
sunflowers at sunset
in South France
is the cure.
They have a powerful magic
at this time as they suck
on the last sunshine
of the day,
sunlight in the sky.
I hope when I die I wake up in these fields
to wander through forever.
