Unsent Letters #5

I’ll see you soon at our café

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Dear K.,

I enjoyed our conversation last week. We should do this more often. What kept us from getting together for so long? Sure, work and family and life and the universe. But we haven’t thought of each other in years, or else we would have found the time, made the time. No shame in admitting that; it can be remedied. How about setting a day of the week to meet at that café we like? We both block an hour in our calendars and commit to being there, unless force majeure intervenes. We’ll make it a habit: a fixed, recurring occurrence. Like the two fellows that meet every afternoon at a café in that Mrebet book. Except we’d do it weekly. I like the place: it’s quiet and clean and smells of fresh pastries, and it’s almost always empty.

There’s beauty and comfort in anchoring to a simple, regular life event, with no objective in mind. An easy moment in space and time to look forward to for no particular reason but the desire to live it. I think we should make it a time for us to feel relaxed and safe, let thoughts come out and conversations flow. And if we want to stay silent, we can. 

When I sat waiting for you at my table, the wind had already wiped out most of the clouds, and the sky looked as blue as itself. I was early, so I made it to a couple of pages of Modiano’s Suspended Sentences. Lately, I always take a book with me. It’s gotten so strange to see people reading books around, instead of phone screens, that sometimes I get funny looks. The guy at the café wanted to know what I was reading, and when I showed him the cover he asked What is it about? Many things, I responded. I was going to continue, or at least try, but he seemed satisfied with my stupid answer and walked away slowly nodding. Some fiction books are hard to pin down in a few words. 

You came in out of breath, as if you had to run. Despite the many years, seeing you felt like resuming something interrupted the night before. Not because you looked exactly the same, which you did by the way, but for all those inexplicable, intangible, mysterious elements that make you you still being there, intact. Some call it personality, but I’ve never been so fond of that term. It’s a concoction of energy, motion, grace, smell, gestures, and the use of eyes. Something that’s really hard to put into words. A long time ago someone told me they loved the way I handled objects. Someone else told me they liked the way I seated. It’s curious how we get across. The fact that some obscure and unique code defines us intimately and immutably across multiple dimensions, some evident to all, some vaguely felt by a minority, and others picked up by only a few, remains a mystery to me. 

But I saw you anxious and preoccupied. You said that things were not good, and that you felt like the target of a universal conspiracy. God has it in for me, you said. I listened carefully, without arguing. You needed to talk. I needed to think about what you said, and steered the conversation toward a different subject. Meanwhile, Charlie Munger passed away at age ninety-nine a few days ago. What’s the connection, you may ask. He was a fine thinker and a wise man and if you don’t know who he was, go look him up. I’m not writing about Munger here. But in the frenzy of obituaries and articles and posts that filled all social and unsocial media after his passing, this quote attributed to him resonated strongly:

“Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia. Every time you find you're drifting into self-pity, I don’t care what the cause, your child could be dying from cancer, self-pity is not going to improve the situation. It’s a ridiculous way to behave. Life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows, it doesn’t matter. [...] There I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and that your duty was not to be immersed in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.”           

And I thought about you, and what you said to me. I won’t give you a sermon on the significance of Munger’s quote -- it’s a powerful, self-explanatory thought I have nothing to add to. I’m not going to tell you how to conduct your life, but I’ll tell you a little story that I heard from a popular Italian comic years ago, and that resurfaced from the depths of my memory the moment you mentioned God. He was dressed as a priest, and they asked him: Do you fear God's punishment? 

“Well, what can I tell you. Back when we were in the Middle Ages, still stuck in the Ptolemaic system, you could maybe believe in God's punishment. There was just the Earth, the Sun, three little planets -- stars were just tiny holes on a black canvas to let light through. That’s all there was to the universe. It was God's only little toy. So maybe you could believe He'd enjoy spying on us, poking around, peeking through the keyhole, sending people to hell. But today, even if He exists (and I’m open minded about this), have you seen what's out there? Billions upon billions of galaxies, gazillions of stars, planets, black holes, quasars, pulsars, oceans of dark matter, beams of neutrinos, antimatter. Even if He exists, would you think someone who made all that cares if on this tiny speck we steal, shoot, or betray our spouses? Do you really think our morality can be the central issue of the universe?”

So, have a laugh. And relax. God doesn’t have it in for you. He’s probably very busy. And we’re so infinitesimally small. 

I’ll see you soon at our café.

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"Unsent Letters" is a series released every other week. These are imaginary letters to fictitious or real individuals who may or may not have influenced my life, not always mirroring actual events.

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