Barge of Night

Sometimes my childhood is returned to me when I least expect it and I am playing a Viking again, in command of a wooden ship sailing the North Sea with a crew of survivors, where just to stay warm I'm forced to bring out all the light in myself.

I now see complexity as a kind of curse--not complexity itself, but the complexity I create in order to have something to do, to feel that I am making meaning of my world by making much more of it than I have to. I now see complexity as a form of sophistication, and contrast this sophistication with actual awareness which is anything but complex. Put differently: the most aware people I know aren't sophisticted at all while the most sophisticated people I know aren't really aware.

I move now among people who have the money and time to go anywhere--and do go anywhere. It's interesting to see where they go. P and his wife are going to India next month. J says he'd never go to India, that he and S, his wife, go only to London, Paris, Amsterdam, or Venice and that they've had this schedule for years. They talked about it one night: we're they getting stale, did they have no sense of adventure? S said, no, we just go where we like to go.

D goes every year for 2 weeks to the Giants spring training in Arizona. He says the team looks good--Matt Cain and Brandon Belt especially--but that it's highly unlikely they'll repeat. It's just so hard, you have to get so lucky, and winning a championship 3 out of 4 years is close to impossible, he says.

Another distinction between complexity, sophistication and awareness: that if you love your life too much and are constantly thinking about it you'll end up having nothing to live for.