To Begin;
I am disgusted with Mussert, and indebted to Nooteboom. While very angry with both. Nooteboom has found the power in "I" to awaken demons you've always wished to lie asleep. And who better than a "dead" man? When else must mankind relinquish all that it holds within but in death? How do You Rise Again when you are still fixated upon the fall!
Quid non imminuit dies? What is not destroyed by time? "Why do you translate 'dies' as 'time'?" Lisa d'India had asked. -P.68 The Following Story.
Why would dies not mean time? What Other Word Would Fit!
Lisa: "It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind." -T.S. Eliot.
And I hope you do see it! Though painfilled the path towards the realization that Nooteboom brings across here. Painfilled indeed. And it is so much more for us. Those who think.
"Anxiety is the Handmaiden of Creativity." -T.S. Eliot
And Mussert certainly is anxious;
"I have never had an exaggerated interest in my own person, but unfortunately that did not imply I could stop thinking about myself at will, from one moment to the next. And that morning I certainly had something to think about."-P.3 The Following Story (Aside: Page does Finnegan "begin" on?)
And what is Anxiety put the inability to deal with the past and future? The weighing down of thoughts, that either have effected the present that could never be changed! or the pull of the future choices that Hamlet's own indecision dragged him to his very death!
And when we quit focusing on the past, the future, when only the present exists then what we were and will be surely does die. And we enter a new mentality. A new Paradox free of old tethers.
This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son. -V. Sirin, Transparent Things.
-If it is not forgetting, than it is letting go.
In Two, we join Socrates aboard the ship with A boy, two old men, two men of his age, and a "women standing somewhat aloof like a figurehead."(-63 TFS.) Everyone aboard the ship (yes, even you), floating down the Lethe, is here to help Socrates crossover (but to where is the catch). To let go. I had an inkling with the Child, Icarus(!), the knowing eyes- it certainly was him. So Childish in his assumption of humanity not being animals that he'd completely given up on growing; but the mind shines through. And the Woman, It was surely Lisa d'India, I not only wanted it with all my might, but the way in which she is described upon the Lethe fits perfectly with how he lived his life around her. And the Father Fermi to whom Socrates has the only ability to communicate (he's always talking to himself, Latin poses a change in translation that makes it impossible for another language to understand......?). As for the Airline Pilot and the Journalist I did not fully understand!
Until i stumbled across this passage:
"Every evening, if that was the right word, one of us would tell his story, and I would know them and not know them, and each of those stories would be the end of another, longer story. The only thing was, the others seemed to know so much better than I what story to tell. Yes, I know now, but I didn't know then. The teller of a story without end is a poor storyteller, as you well knew. No one was afraid, as far as I could see. We were past that stage."- 106, TFS
After This I decided to turn back a few pages and found what everyone should certainly read again. Starting with the signal from the woman to the boy (102) all the way to where the author says these words:
"So in fact, while we saw no one but her, the narrator saw someone who inspired him to find the words to express the inner reality of his story."-104, TFS.
And then I Continued reading on page 107 where I came across what certainly was a giant clue to what was going on:
"When it would be my turn I did not know; for the time being I was content to listen to the others and watch, to read the anecdotes of their lives as if they had been invented especially for me."-107 TFS.
And this is where everything hit home. Why he kept talking to me, to you. Why he was telling the following story. His death. His rebirth.
And then there is Peter Harris (catch up on him and Dolce Domum on p.98), A.K.A Arend Herfst, whom finds the logic in his own death by a jealous knife (107-8, ). ( Explicit 20oo KM Lifetime reference on 107)
And then there is Captain Dekobra (13 Minute Lifetime, 108), whom is on a journey, (a spiritual cleansing) and all he can think about is:
"two banal containers lying in their separate freezers somewhere down below."-108, TFS
he than continues to tell us about all that matters in his life as he plummets, following with:
"the two women in his life for whom he always prepared a special meal before his departure, which he left in their freezers so that they would eat them when he was on the other side of the world; it was ridiculous and childish maybe, but it had always been a source of surreptitious pleasure."-109, TFS
Crito and Maria?
And then there is Deng . And though I won't look into it at this time, Deng has to be the Oriental equivalent of Socrates. And so much should be said about this! Socrates! Musserts death of his literate self! Socrates trying to banish all the poets! Musserts love for Latin that is squandered by translation! I will simply say what has already been requoted:
"I experience calumny in the morning and expulsion the very same night." -113, TFS
And then Socrates is left with me and Lisa d'India. Telling The Following Story to us, To Lisa d'India who loves him only in time (p.91 IFF!, Voice p.97). And she and I see the death of the man lying in bed in Amsterdam, because really, he's only a story. And it is only to us that he can tell the story, because only "we" can understand (One) the end of his "20 Minute Liftetime".
There I lay, very still, water dripping from my face, and through those tears I saw myself lying in bed in Amsterdam. I slept, tossing and turning my head, and crying, still clutching the photograph from the evening newspaper in my left hand. I looked at the little Japanese alarm clock I always keep next to my bed. What sort of time can this be in which time stands still? It wasn't any later than it had been when I went to sleep. The dark shape at my feet had to be Night Owl, successor to Bat. I could see that the man in Amsterdam wanted to wake up, he was thrashing about, his right hand groping for his glasses, but it was not he who switched on the light; it was me. here in Lisbon.- 60, TFS
And while I'm so angry with this "man" who runs away from a fight, who does not believe in our animal side, this man who cannot even see what it is he lacks in sight! (Him who throws away the Letter). Yet, I love him for what he's done. For the power he has given his new life, the "I" that awakens in Lisbon.
To Give up everything and begin again is no small task.
Begin? That was not the right word, and it is important now to choose the right words; you know that better than I do. He did not begin; he ended.-p.102 TFS.
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