The Shape of What Remains » Entries
I just arrived at my gate. It looks identical to Gate 23 and Gate 33, which look the same as Gate 12 several weeks ago. Same blue-gray carpeting. Same signs and monitors showing the same information in the same font. Same stains near the same rows of the same seats.
Every gate is this gate, the same arrangement of chairs and screens repeated across untold airports in what Borges would recognize as disorder becoming order through repetition. Odd how repetition can feel like devotion—truth, even.
Every traveller is this traveller. Over and over again. City after city. Century after century.
Departures, to me, are less about leaving and more about suspension—that third point between two other points, and none of them feel entirely part of you.
The book is closed on my index finger, marking page 118. Borges wrote of the eternal traveler who discovers that infinite volumes of a seemingly infinite library repeat in the same disorder, which becomes order through repetition—the Order. He found his solitude cheered by that elegant hope.
I can't read beyond this page right now. The idea has lodged itself too deeply—almost an Autonomous Complex, as Jung called it. It needs to be turned over and examined from different angles. Allowed to throw its strange light across other thoughts, thereby hastening even more thoughts. A succulent splinter that has stabbed itself into my mind.
There's always something demanding this kind of attention. And the world is kind enough to give me these suspended moments to contemplate them.
And so, no matter the room, no matter the wait, I'm never bored.
Dean Bowman
Dean Bowman
Dean Bowman
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