4am ramblings of an insomniac
There's a moment at the end of the film Blade Runner where Rutger Hauer's character, having reached the end of his preprogrammed lifespan, talks about the things that he's seen in his four short years, then makes a poignant comment on life and death:
"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
And then he does. The entire movie is a parable about what it means to be human and the nature of memories, but for me it's that one line, and the pathos behind it, that sticks with me. No matter how much you see and do in a lifetime, there is always a huge part of it which goes with you when you die, lost forever to the rest of the world.
Sometimes I think that keeping a blog or a journal could be a way to keep those experiences alive; after all, with the almost unlimited lifespan of information on the web now, anything you publish has a good chance of outliving you, whether you'd like it to or not. The problem is that a lifetime isn't made up of big noteworthy experiences or even minor blogworthy ones, but small little moments that are hard to put into words, and harder still to appreciate vicariously.
Here's an example, one which was running through my mind tonight for reasons unknown as I lay awake in bed. Back in the early 1990's, I took a business trip to North Andover, MA, to the headquarters of the company I was working for at the time. It was one of my first real business trips, and for that matter, one of my first real trips anywhere. The idea was to spend the week meeting and working with colleagues that I normally only talked to via email, but my evenings were pretty much my own.
One night, I stopped into a music store to browse the discount cassette bin, and picked up an album by a woman named Kate Bush called Hounds of Love. I have to admit that I'm not the biggest Kate Bush fan, since some of her earlier songs are reminiscent of a small animal screeching on helium, but when I put the tape in and drove around that night, there was something there that captured the feeling and froze it into my memory. I still remember the synchronicity of pulling over beside the road and listening to the lyrics to Hello Earth:
I get out of my car, step into the night
And look up at the sky.
And there's something bright, travelling fast.
Look at it go...
To the average person, including anyone who reads my account of it, this might sound meaningless at best, and laughable at worst. But to this day, when I hear the song, I'm right back alongside the car on a northern Massachusetts road, looking up at the stars through spent rainclouds. It's not something I can put down into words, and I can't explain why that small moment has stuck with me. It could be the fact that I was a young kid in his early 20's traveling alone for one of the first times; it could be knowing, in retrospect, that I had spent a couple of hours earlier chatting leisurely with the man my then-wife was having an affair with, although I didn't know that at the time; or it could be that I have a natural propensity to imagine that song lyrics somehow apply to me. Whatever the reason, there's a strong connection with that moment in my memory, one which I don't think I could explain without somehow recounting everything else that was going through my head at the time. Maybe there are writers who are capable of doing just that, but I'm not one of them.
Like a lot of things on my mind lately, this all comes about, at least in part, by thinking about the fact that I'll be a father very soon, and that someday my daughter might be curious about what kind of person I was before she came along. I know that my Mom and Dad must have had experiences before I was born that still stick with them, and I would love to be able to read what they would have written about them back in 1967. On the other hand, maybe it's best not to let her know I'm too human, at least until she's old enough not to use it against me as proof of my own fallibility. Why, back in my day, we didn't have time to go driving around willy-nilly, listening to songs about Emily Brontë novels and rainmaking machines.
At least someday she'll know what I did when I was up late with insomnia: namely, writing long, rambling posts quoting Rutger Hauer movies and Kate Bush albums.
"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
And then he does. The entire movie is a parable about what it means to be human and the nature of memories, but for me it's that one line, and the pathos behind it, that sticks with me. No matter how much you see and do in a lifetime, there is always a huge part of it which goes with you when you die, lost forever to the rest of the world.
Sometimes I think that keeping a blog or a journal could be a way to keep those experiences alive; after all, with the almost unlimited lifespan of information on the web now, anything you publish has a good chance of outliving you, whether you'd like it to or not. The problem is that a lifetime isn't made up of big noteworthy experiences or even minor blogworthy ones, but small little moments that are hard to put into words, and harder still to appreciate vicariously.
Here's an example, one which was running through my mind tonight for reasons unknown as I lay awake in bed. Back in the early 1990's, I took a business trip to North Andover, MA, to the headquarters of the company I was working for at the time. It was one of my first real business trips, and for that matter, one of my first real trips anywhere. The idea was to spend the week meeting and working with colleagues that I normally only talked to via email, but my evenings were pretty much my own.
One night, I stopped into a music store to browse the discount cassette bin, and picked up an album by a woman named Kate Bush called Hounds of Love. I have to admit that I'm not the biggest Kate Bush fan, since some of her earlier songs are reminiscent of a small animal screeching on helium, but when I put the tape in and drove around that night, there was something there that captured the feeling and froze it into my memory. I still remember the synchronicity of pulling over beside the road and listening to the lyrics to Hello Earth:
I get out of my car, step into the night
And look up at the sky.
And there's something bright, travelling fast.
Look at it go...
To the average person, including anyone who reads my account of it, this might sound meaningless at best, and laughable at worst. But to this day, when I hear the song, I'm right back alongside the car on a northern Massachusetts road, looking up at the stars through spent rainclouds. It's not something I can put down into words, and I can't explain why that small moment has stuck with me. It could be the fact that I was a young kid in his early 20's traveling alone for one of the first times; it could be knowing, in retrospect, that I had spent a couple of hours earlier chatting leisurely with the man my then-wife was having an affair with, although I didn't know that at the time; or it could be that I have a natural propensity to imagine that song lyrics somehow apply to me. Whatever the reason, there's a strong connection with that moment in my memory, one which I don't think I could explain without somehow recounting everything else that was going through my head at the time. Maybe there are writers who are capable of doing just that, but I'm not one of them.
Like a lot of things on my mind lately, this all comes about, at least in part, by thinking about the fact that I'll be a father very soon, and that someday my daughter might be curious about what kind of person I was before she came along. I know that my Mom and Dad must have had experiences before I was born that still stick with them, and I would love to be able to read what they would have written about them back in 1967. On the other hand, maybe it's best not to let her know I'm too human, at least until she's old enough not to use it against me as proof of my own fallibility. Why, back in my day, we didn't have time to go driving around willy-nilly, listening to songs about Emily Brontë novels and rainmaking machines.
At least someday she'll know what I did when I was up late with insomnia: namely, writing long, rambling posts quoting Rutger Hauer movies and Kate Bush albums.
posted by greg at 4:08 AM
1 Comments:
What may surprise her someday is to realize, as we
all eventually do, that our parents were really young once, and had their own private thoughts, emotions and passions. Just as we parents must come to realize that each of our own children is an individual with his or her own thoughts, ambitions, etc., and not just carbon copies of us as we sometimes think they will be. We're glad our children turned out as
wonderful as they are!
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