I just finished reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. For Milan Kundera, the “lightness” of “being” (experiencing humanness) is the great tragedy we must all contend with. At first I read that “lightness” as a kind of smallness, the trite but important sense of smallness that overcomes a person standing alone beside an ocean, but now I understand that reading of the word is wrong. A small thing can be a significant thing but the “lightness” he speaks of is the complete insignificance of the totality of our human lives.
I had a bad day at work yesterday and you won’t be surprised to hear that my mood sunk lower while reading this book on the train ride home. Much has been said of the experience of riding on a subway. Sometimes it gives me that ocean feeling of smallness, which humbles and excites me. Yesterday it made me feel lonely. So there I was feeling lonely in a train car of silent strangers, with my mom on the other side of the world, with a sadness exasperated by the “unbearabl[y]” sad idea that my sadness, though it marks my “being,” is of no significance. Sadness marks our “being” - so at least Kundera throws us that bone (not that I take for granted what he’s saying… I just have a habit of seeking my own way out of these heady tangles). But you know what? I’m somewhat comforted by that affirmation, afterall.
I still felt sad on that train ride though, and I haven’t felt so sad in Taiwan yet. I’ve experienced some dips in my mood, but none that gave me that fearful tearful feeling. At 77 degrees Farenheit, yesterday was the coldest it’s been here since my arrival. I made a plan to go home, turn down the air-conditioning and make vegetable noodle soup like my grandma and mom make. Once out of the subway I decided to walk to a grocery store I remembered seeing once on HuPing with a slogan like, “get your fresh fruits and vegetables here!” I walked there, past the hoards of people getting out of work, past two separate trash collection cites, to find a grocery store full of everything but fruits and vegetables.
In this instance my sadness made no room for frustration, a feeling I often host as a new foreigner. I just turned around back in the direction of our apartment and stopped by the grocery store close to home, which lacks in the produce area, and picked up some carrots, celery, onion, and chicken broth. Back home, I got to cooking straight away. Soon the apartment smelled like home and Max and I had hot bowls of home to eat. I started to feel grateful for the feeling of sadness and the particular sense of self affirmation it sometimes brings with it, not to mention soup.
This evening, sadness caused me to write. It also brought me up to the roof of our apartment to watch the sunset. It embarrasses me to say that I’ve only been up there a couple of times. Most days I don’t get home until after dark and it’s so nice to be in a safe and private place I find nothing enticing about a big dark sky or lights flickering in windows to remind me, for the umpteenth time that day, that I am a stranger among millions of strangers. Sitting on the couch, finishing up the book, I noticed the sun setting pinkly over the river and the buildings that break up the slice of horizon we look at every day. I carelessly finished the book (I was more than ready to finish with it) but setting it down I felt unsure of what to do with myself. Like usual, I felt sort of scared to go up to the roof and risk feeling smallness or vertigo, but then I thought about how I already had a fearful tearful feeling anyway and I made myself go.
It was a purely pink sunset, without a trace of yellow or orange or blue. Swells of clouds or smog took on strange rectangular shapes like the buildings all around them. On the roof of the building next door a man hung laundry. The rooftops of most buildings are inexplicably dilapidated, with random boards poking out and plants pouring off the edges. They look like shacks from tropical islands dropped off on modern buildings. To be honest, while up on the roof I thought of little other than these roof shacks.
My point in writing about this experience is not to share the content of my thought, for there is not much to it. The point is that I went up there at all. Feeling stable for most of this past month, I haven’t gone up to the roof for fear of disrupting that stability. When you’re already off balance, when you’re sad and you already feel a flash more alive, sometimes you live a little more.
Kundera says that our lives are flimsy because the events are random and linear. In response to that I like to think about how feelings appear and disappear in more or less the same colors over and over again throughout our lives. They differently affirm our senses of self, even if the events that inspire those feelings baffle us. It was not the soup itself that I craved, but rather the recurring feelings I associate with it, feelings I hoped to summon up within me.
In conclusion I’ll just say that all of it – the sadness and the all stuff it brings out of me – feels significant to me. Soups, ideas, sunsets, over and over again.
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