Looking back on the waning year, and several years before, it’s all “achieve your dreams... Burger King... achieve your dreams... Burger King...”
The narcotic of work. The narcotic of doing well in a sphere where the criteria for success are so clear and so readily given in advance; there’s nothing like it for putting ambition to sleep for a day, a week. But it wakes up in a bad mood.
Fifteen years ago, when the web was an alley, we put on weeknight shows in bad lighting, with no sound system, and a few had talent, luck and hustle to get out of the alley before it was condemned. God above, stars were born! (It was that story; I didn’t see it coming.) The stars will object: a red dwarf is not Betelgeuse. We answer: such differences of degree mean nothing as against all those smaller lumps of hydrogen that never caught fire, and please the gods with no light.
The idea of being vindicated has to go. Nothing can prove to Baudelaire that he is not inferior to those he despises.
Montale again: La vita che sembrava / vasta è più breve del tuo fazzoletto. The life that seemed vast is briefer than your handkerchief. In Italian a handkerchief can be brief.
