Tuesday, November 24, 2009
A beautiful mind (over sushi)
Last night I went for dinner with a friend of mine who is so ridiculously intelligent, witty and erudite it makes me feel like I'm living in a Cinema Nouveau subtitled art movie set in Paris in the inter war years every time I see him. He brings up things like Stoicism's contribution to early Christianity while you ask him to pass you the soy sauce, an apparently obvious continuation of the conversation we had been having about Freudian psychology and the reasons for being attracted to people who make us unhappy. It's a wild ride. It's never a monologue and it's always funny. You can't sit back and mention the banalities of everyday life for fear of the disappointment in his face. There is no relief; it's hard to keep up, but there is no option but to up the ante and join the conversation. I usually drink heavily to relieve the pressure to be entertaining. But I always leave these high-voltage urbane mind-offs feeling oddly rejuvenated. They remind me that it's not things or events that make life interesting, it's our reaction to them. The external world is just a series of events: our minds and our decisions and our creative narrative are what bring the magic. Being bored just means you're being lazy.
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erudite? you make me feel like i'm living in cinema nouvou
ReplyDeleteYour homo-erotic rugby stories totally belong in there :)
ReplyDeleteVoglio sposarti entro tre anni. Non hai nessuna scelta.
ReplyDeleteNo, I really mean it. It's getting to be time that we lived in the same street, and that our friend groups began to coalesce, in order that our lives enmesh so that our interest align in order that the wedding, in the Autumn of 2012, be everyone's happy day, with no gin-powered melancholic violence, many crying relatives (but not me and not you) and ample cake. You may praise those whose thoughts you find praiseworthy, but I prefer to entrap those people whose company casts everything in a sepia glow, so that the yellowing walls of a Sushi den become a bar on the Bund in Old Shanghai, and 'Call Me Al' becomes a dapper Scots agent with a Tortured Past and a ballsy manner with the lads. And when I say 'entrap', I mean that in a legally and financially binding way, prerequisite to the adoption of children, (hot and Cambodian or otherwise).
ReplyDeleteOh, you should've stuck with me.