4.6.25 - The Woman in the Sand Dunes

With the phone gone, I have completed reading one novel - My name is Lucy Barton -  and I'm on my way to completing a second one. I'll probably be done by the end of the week. It was given to me by Emma, as a birthday present. It's a classic work of Japanese literature and came out of that time where in the 60s, everyone was asking what did it mean to be alive? It was the age of Satre and Camus, and de Beauvior. It was when having an existential crisis was a cool thing to have. 

It was clear that the story was about how we are all trapped by life and that life sucks. The sand, mortality, gets everywhere. Hating the feeling of sand at the beach, I couldn't QUITE get past the irritation of the sand being everywhere. In Singapore sand is sticky because of the humidity. Here sand just slides off you when it dries. In Singapore, nothing ever dries out completely. Your legs become sticky because of the salt. Unless you are in the sun. Here, even without sun, the low humidity means that the sand dusts off easy.

But I'm starting again and it's the kind of book you can pick up anywhere because the predicament of the man who is the protagonist, despite the name of the book, is quite predictable. A predictable predicament. I then began to think about all the things which I had discovered about life along the way. For instance, how at first I did believe the state - this is probably why I hate it so much - and am so sensitive to propaganda. And I did believe religion. And I did believe in family and this very narrow sense of a rules based order. I believed in my own sense of serving the state.

Then I discovered nihilism and for a long time I was a nihilist. The god is dead everything is permitted thing. A quote I did not find reassuring, but rather traumatising. Then I discovered feminism and spirituality through the goddess. And after a long long time, I came - have come - to understand that the most important thing in this life is not life itself, but love. 

Love is not sand however. To be stuck and to turn life and the business of living into a sand infested trial is not what life is about. I believe at the end of the novel he can escape but decides to stay... perhaps that is his redemption, or his cowardice, or his Stockholm syndrome. Who can tell?