Matching Tracksuits

Tall, slim, metallic – my filing cabinet was one of my prized possessions in the States. I had a drawer for my current semester: materials, handouts, tests, syllabi. I had a draw for all the previous semesters. I had a drawer for financial documents: receipts, bills, bank information. And of course I had a miscellaneous drawer. I could go straight to anything.

Now I dream of having a filing cabinet to organize myself. I think since I’ve been I Poland, I’ve seen a couple, but they don’t seem to be popular. At school, I keep all my papers and documents in a little cubby-hole – literally. At home, I have tons of little binders and folders that I keep tax info in, visa documents, etc. But no filing cabinet.

I used to think of myself as highly organized, but sloth and lack of storage space (not to mention a lack of filing cabinets – I like filing cabinets) has led me to a state of semi-chaos. I don’t lose my keys often, but I often temporarily misplace materials from school, simply because I don’t have a place to store it all neatly and systematically. Which drives me bananas.

Pens are a story in themselves. I have a very nice Cross Townsend black lacquer fountain pen that I bought, by some fluke of mis-pricing or something, for only sixty buck. I’ve had it for ten years now, and never once have I thought I’d lost it. I have a beautiful stainless steel Parker Sonnet fountain pen that Kinga bought for me for Christmas, which, because of its weight (that Cross is heavy) goes with me to school every day. Never lost it. I have another Parker filled with red ink for grading papers – never misplaced it. All told, I have four fountain pens, and I’ve never lost one. Ballpoint pens, though, are a different story. Three. I’ve lost three. Most recently, I lost one that Kinga gave me last Christmas. Yes, it is only March, but the horrid thing is, I lost it before the end of January! How?! I’ve no clue.

In conversations, do you tend to listen or talk more?

“There’s a reason the good Lord gave us two ears and only one mouth,” the saying goes. You learn more from listening than from talking, but that’s not the reason I often find myself sitting silent in groups, listening and not participating. Kinga says I should make more of an effort, but the problem is, I’ve found that many times people are talking about something I know nothing about, or (worse) care nothing about. And so I sit and let them do the work of keeping the conversation going.

One-on-one is a different story, though, and Kinga will tell you I can talk up a storm when I’m inspired (read: irritated).

Question 165 Are you well organized? How often do you have to look for your keys?

Group conversation, though, just baffles me. When I first returned to Poland, I thought it was a language issue, that I just wasn’t following everything. I went back to the States the summer of 2002 and one evening, found myself at a bar with a few friends and their friends and other friends of friends–mostly strangers, in other words. My attention drifted from one conversation to another, and I realized that it wasn’t the language in Poland that was messing me up. I’m just not good at “small talk.” I listened intently to what pairs and trios were talking about, and even then I’d have been hard pressed to nail down a sort of thesis statement for the conversation. I simply had no idea what the hell they were talking about.

Small talk is an oxymoron.

I’m not saying that all conversation needs to be about something “deep” (whatever that might mean), but it does need a grounding for me. What that means in practical terms is that I’m very quiet when I’m with a group of people I don’t know. Once I know that someone shares the same interest as I, I begin opening up a bit.

When I do begin talking, I guess I like talking about something meaningful. I once had a very long conversation with a friend of a friend of Kinga’s about forgiveness, what it means, and whether we can truly forgive another person. It was a Highlanders’ party, and Polish Highlanders are like me, squared: very distant and silent (cautious, even) until they get to know you. In that sense, the two of us had a bit of an impetus to our conversation.

And waste an entire year of my life? How can anything be called “perfect happiness” if we don’t remember it later? “Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates, like a tomb which rejects the living,” wrote Elie Wiese inl his Nobel Lecture.

Question 35 Would you give up half of what you own now for a pill that would permanently change you so that one hour of sleep each day would fully refresh you? (Additional questions: Do you feel you have enough time? If not, what would give you that feeling? How much has your attitude about time changed as you’ve aged?) Answers due 25 February Class dismissed

I am, admittedly, in love with memory. Obsessed, at one point. Willa Cather wrote in My Antonia, “Some memories are realities and better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” It could have been a summary of my general view on life at that time, many years ago, when I was unsure of the future and only certain that the past had often been wondrous.

I was so worried about forgetting something, and I soon found that in fact I remembered insignificant details about things that my friends perhaps didn’t even notice.

Once I sat in horror as a friend told me that not only could she not remember what we’d talked about in a conversation six months earlier, but she couldn’t even remember having the conversation. It was not a lighthearted talk about who’s going to make it to the World Series – it was a discussion of our entire friendship up to that point. “And she can’t remember it?!” I lay in bed thinking that night, unable to understand how it was possible.

What would be the good of a year’s experiences that would leave no mark upon us? In many ways, we are our memories:

How much of what we are, what we know about ourselves, is really true? We are merely the sum of viewpoints, and human memory is treacherous and inconsistent.
Ilan Stavans, On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language

Learning is memory, especially learning from mistakes. But we don’t just learn from our unhappy memories, and so the notion of a year spent that leaves no memory is absolutely horrifying to me.

It’s a year spent completely drunk. When drunk, we’re often perfectly happy; the next day, we often don’t remember our antics. Take that and multiply it by 365 and you get Question 4’s “one year in perfect happiness.”

But what is meant by “perfect happiness?” I’ve always tried to act as if happiness depending on me, not on other people. “How I choose to react” and similar notions. In other words, for a middle class guy like me, happiness is around every corner. I really lack nothing materially–food, clothing warmth–and so what is there to be unhappy about? That statement reveals quite a bit about my experiences, I realize.

Happiness has also included the thought that, when I look back on a given moment, I’ll still be happy – no regret, in other words.

Second, what is meant by “remember nothing?” Does it mean I would immediately forget every moment as soon as it passed? Or does it mean that I would accumulate a year of memories, then suddenly they would vanish? Either option seems horrible to me.

This question is somewhat shallow, I must admit, because I can’t think that anyone would answer in the affirmative. Even without the extreme view that the present moment doesn’t really exist and instead is something trapped between what was and what will be, the present moment is so brief that it represents an atomically small percent of our lives. Much more of our lives are spent remembering the past or planning the future than living the moment.

Perhaps that’s the trick, having your Book of Questions cake and eating it too: make the most of the moment. It’s easier said than done.