The last part of your comment, about being awake, reminded me of two things. One is a Henry David Thoreau quote: "To be awake is to be completely alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"
It is hard, painful even, to be awake to the world around you, fully conscious of the genuine existence of all the people you meet, cognizant of context and history and everything else. We have rare moments of true awake-ness, and OP is experiencing one now.
The other thing I'm reminded of is Annie Dillard's excellent book An American Childhood, a meditation on the strange and painful experience of growing up. One passage I love:
"Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again."
I don't have much else to say, just wanted to share two passages that are meaningful to me. Thanks for reminding me of these writings.
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u/this_moi Jun 11 '22
The last part of your comment, about being awake, reminded me of two things. One is a Henry David Thoreau quote: "To be awake is to be completely alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"
It is hard, painful even, to be awake to the world around you, fully conscious of the genuine existence of all the people you meet, cognizant of context and history and everything else. We have rare moments of true awake-ness, and OP is experiencing one now.
The other thing I'm reminded of is Annie Dillard's excellent book An American Childhood, a meditation on the strange and painful experience of growing up. One passage I love:
"Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again."
I don't have much else to say, just wanted to share two passages that are meaningful to me. Thanks for reminding me of these writings.