New Car Smell

I think I'm a bit lacking in emotion. Well, that is a bit inaccurate. I am lacking in powerful emotion. I never get truly angry, and I am never genuinely happy. I am easily annoyed, but that is like a feather drifting in calm air. I may attempt to bear it aloft by huffing at it, but it will only rise so far, and no further. My temper is never caught by the wind and ripped into the sky. Instead it slips all too easily to the ground.

A similar problem exists with feeling happy. I tend to believe that there is a difference between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure is easily sought and found. A pile of hot, crispy prata would certainly give me pleasure now. Will it make me happy? That's a harder question to answer. If the answer is yes, then it seems a bit sad that my happiness turns on a bit of fried dough.

Happiness implies something beyond mere pleasure. Consider the difference between visiting a prostitute and getting married to someone you genuinely love. I have not experienced the latter, but I imagine that the happiness derived from this most cliched of happiness-generating activities is of a different nature to the pleasure obtained from sexual contact with a prostitute, no matter how intense the pleasure involved.

One way of approaching the problem of what exactly constitutes happiness is to dive into the analytics, to break it down and consider the parts. I don't feel like doing that at the moment, so I shall digress. Severely.

I have discovered that I do not panic very easily either. A couple of nights ago, there was a moment when I smelt something that seemed like it might be a full tank of gas catching fire and the wind was snapped out of me. I tried to take a breath, but found that my lungs were not opening up. No air entered. So I reached for my chest, not to grab at it in hopes of somehow forcing air in, but to probe for parts moving independent of each other. The most obvious sign of a fracture is different areas of connected bone moving in differing directions. So I poked a bit, and found that aside from some pain on contact, nothing seemed to be severely fractured, so my lungs were unlikely to be collapsed. Another breath, again nothing. So I leaned back and tried to extend my torso, to ease up on the internal organs somewhat. Another attempt at breath, while continuing to probe my chest for any obvious injuries. Still nothing. Someone asking if I was alright, but I was a bit annoyed at her, so I reached for the door handle. Unfortunately, without oxygen, I was having some difficulty pushing the door open. Then air started to enter. Gasping would have been painful on abused lungs, so I opted for a more measured approach to refilling them.

Strangely enough, my car still has that new car smell, even on a dusty lot amongst other battered hunks of metal.

Shrug

I frequently fail to understand some people. Well, that's not entirely true. It is not that I do not understand them, it is that I cannnot empathise with them. Why do they do the things they do? Why do they think the way they do? I know the reasons for these intellectually, but find that the reasons clash violently with my own concept of what should compose a human being's psyche.

To illustrate, allow me to narrate an incident when I was about ten or eleven. My primary school class was on a field trip to one of the refinery islands off the mainland, if it can be called that, of Singapore. I think it was the Shell refinery, but I could be mistaken. I recall sitting on the bus, staring out the window at the sky, utterly taken at the sheer beauty of the sky on that morning. The sky was a clear azure, possessed of the sort of clarity that is sorely missing from our everyday lives. We mix colours, try to make things better, faster, more interesting. In the end, we do nothing but confuse ourselves. We lose sight of the fact that simplicity can be perfect. When we look upon something that is unadorned, we dare not consider the notion that it should be left as it is. Instead, we try to improve it. Everything can be improved, nothing should be allowed to stay as it is. This attitude is a major driver of our concept of productivity, but surely there must be moments when you pause and remark to yourself that things were so much better before complexity blanketed life.

I certainly do. Even now, as I sip a wine, I think about the grape, the year, the producer, the terroir, the way the wine tastes forward and back, the progression as it breathes, the possibility of aging, the possible matches with food or cheese, the way the scent rises as I swirl it. I can remember a time when I would have smiled and sincerely appreciated an easily drinkable wine, no reservations over a screwcap or box. I can also envisage a time when a wine becomes a veritable encyclopedia of information on my tongue. To a very large extent, I enjoyed the boxed wine far more than I would a 1982 Lafite today. The sticky sweetness of a lychee martini was heaven then, whilst a 1974 Bordeaux today would not impress me with its age, but that someone would bother to keep it for over thirty years. Losing the capacity to be impressed is a terribly sad thing, and one I would not wish upon any person, even those I despise, for the despicable do need to be awed now and then.

Returning to the bus, I commented to someone that the sky was quite gorgeous that day. The sky was of a pure blue, and the clouds shone with a radiance that evoked little beyond thoughts of heaven, as it is depicted in popular culture. In return, I received a brief acknowledgement that the sky was quite good looking, but it was all too philosophical for him, then a shrug and return to some inane ten year old game.

I can understand the failure to think about clarity and purity. Perhaps I was simply deluded. I could not understand the shrug. A fatal resignation to the fact that some things were beyond him. I would have at least expected an attempt to think about what he felt he did not comprehend. Instead, a shrug.

I used to think that all people strove to be better than they are. That when they run up against a barrier, they at least contemplate some means of overcoming it, instead of merely shrugging and changing direction. The human spirit should be above that. We should strive and crave and lust for something better. Even if it is nothing more than a superior understanding of what is already before them.

Given that there was nothing particularly deep about the sky that morning, or any other morning, is it so offensive to allow appreciation of simple beauty to grow in one's breast for a moment before dismissing it?

"I wasn't old enough to be young."
- Michael Frayn, Donkeys' Years