About two weeks ago I went on a somewhat exotic trip with one of my best friends since middle school. Since 2000, that would be. We became friends after we were assigned to share a desk from the very beginning, the usual way of making friends in our youthful years, full of happy or unfortunate coincidences. I've always considered it to be one of the best things that has ever happened to me. There's really nothing better than having some intelligent, fun, loving and morally upright companions throughout one's learning and trying years. What made you who you are? Didn't your path adjust itself every time you decided to befriend A, not B?
We went to the same high school but were in different classes, thus hung out less. We went to universities in different cities, thus at most saw each other once a year. The last time we met was in 2013 in Salzburg, when I first moved to Vienna and she was living in Nice. The time before last was in 2011 in Florence, when I was shortly living in Florence and she was living in Nice. Some years ago she moved back to China. I'm not the greatest at staying in touch, but friends as such don't require any stay-in-touch formality, or so I should hope. I originally planned to fly to Cape Verde alone for two weeks just because it is allegedly warm there in November. I shared this plan with her in one of our brief exchanges of messages, and she said, are you inviting me to come along? I was reasonably excited. In the end, we concluded that Cape Verde was too far away from China and we should go to Jordan and Israel instead. I could never forget what Maugham famously said, “We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.” Now that can be applied in a much broader sense than the one person that we are supposed to love more than others. And on that note, I picked up this bestselling book at the airport, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (actually I picked up Optimism over Despair at the airport and ordered this one on Amazon because I did not want to pay the premium for airport placement twice). It contains the question "what if everyone had only one soulmate in this world". I haven't read it yet but I think the answer can be summarized into "thank god that's not the case". Ok back to Maugham's wisdom and my title of this entry. If we are all constantly changing and we are not lucky enough to be around each other to witness those changes, is our knowledge of each other based solely on a past that's obsolete, thus rendering our knowledge obsolete? Are we allowed to claim to know someone if we only know them from a time that is not the present? When our memory starts to shatter and there is nothing new to fill that void in the shape of our helplessness in retaining what is bound to be gone. Why is it that our memories of the earlier years seem to be much more solid than those formed later? Why is it that we would, despite our lack of current knowledge of each other, despite our inability to even lead a meaningful conversation at times, still choose to put each other before others, who are perhaps much more relevant to our life in the present tense? Why is it that we sometimes attach such a disproportionate value to our past? Is it because we are afraid that we won't know who we are if we are without our past? I guess "I know someone" is after all a rather general term. No one would challenge me if I say I know my neighbor, with whom I only conversed once under a somewhat coerced circumstance. I guess my point is, things are never to be taken out of context to be evaluated. That you are invaluable to me must not be simply understood as an ephemeral statement that is almost based on an impulse, but rather be put into the context of a lifetime. Maybe that's why tears always come to my mind but stop before rushing out of my eyes when I listen to Jay Chou's earlier albums. Very rarely do I think of listening to them, really. That's the perpetual wrestling between the transitory present me and the me that is the sum of my whole life.
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