Desire

GUYS THE WICKED KING BY HOLLY BLACK IS OUT AND I'M SO HYPED. JUST READ KING OF SCARS BY LEIGH BARDUGO AND I'M EXTREMELY SHOOK. i don't know how writers have such skill and grace and where the stories come from!!!!!!

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Anyway, today I wanted to write about my experience going to the national library after a long, long break. It had been a long break because as I'd written a while ago, I'd lost my identity, or at least, my identity cards, and the main thing tethering me to the state was, strangely enough, the very thing that enabled me to get away—my passport. Also, I couldn't borrow any books as a result.

So I'd gone to make a new IC because I needed to renew my passport so I could fly away and pretend to fall in love on the wind-swept platform of an electric tram in Italy. As it was, I had time to spare after the mind-numbing process of waiting an hour and a half for my number to appear, and then the cool, brisk process of having my thumb prints taken, then paying $100 ($100!!!) for a new card. So I went to the library after that.

I wasn't prepared for the experience of walking into the library. I mean I work in one. But this was something visceral, a physical jolt. I'd forgotten the sheer delight of potential that libraries offer. Microcosms of knowledge stored in each book and rows upon rows of books as far as the eye could see. I felt like I'd come home to my kingdom. The king who goes away to fight a long pyrrhic battle, neither winning nor losing, and comes back and sees his shining castle on the hill with its craggy towers and mossy stone walls and the river meandering through and around, so comfortably familiar and so unknown, and so much potential for progress and renewal and growth. I felt like that.

Was immediately drawn to the shelf sponsored by the French government. I really enjoy postmodern French philosophy. Like I shouldn't, because they write in such opaque language, but i do. There's something very lovely and refreshing about following difficult thought couched in terms i don't understand. It makes the understanding so much more worthwhile. I had a class once, under a professor teaching psychoanalysis, and she kept saying that the words of Freud were so "suggestive". I hated that word because I didn't have a clue what Freud was suggesting, but now I've come to see that she meant that Freud's words tended to spark ideas like setting fire to the undergrowth and seeing a whole forest catch. His ideas suggested other ideas, and that's what she meant by suggestive. Not to mention the double entendre on desire and forms of desire at the heart of Freud's writings.

I've been thinking a lot about desire lately.

Aquinas wrote that "The form (nature) of the desire is in the desired". I think this is one of the more beautiful things I've read. Which is to say, that all desire must have an object, an end goal. There is no such thing as an endless desire. I thought this was very reassuring, because lately, the restlessness has sprung up again. The desire to be better, to do better, to live better, and work better, and of course, the constant measuring of the self against an arbitrary stick.

I'm planning to go to Italy this year, towards the end of May and in the beginning of June.