Yesterday I enjoyed again, five years and a half after its release, David Mackenzie's neo-Western film Hell or High Water. I left, as the first time I watched it, very aesthetically and narratively pleased.
As a bonus, the final credits music reminded me of the great Chris Stapleton and his first solo album, Traveller. That music was this extremely cool song, Outlaw State of Mind:
I enjoy the last hours of the day the most, just after the fall of the sun. It is the time of quiet, books, intimate conversation, lovemaking longing and burning prayer. I feel like it is also a time when anxiety and fear have a peculiar difficulty for creeping into the mind. Freedom reigns, and lack of obligations showers us with opportunities to be merry or sense intensely, alone or with a few others.
Meditation is surely, as many wise people have said, the most appropriate and high activity of the mind. Under the dark sky, or inside a dimly lighted room, our spirit is able to ascend out of its daily worries and occupy itself searching for understanding and meaning, or maybe if you can believe it, eternal or spiritual or things out there...
But I mean, reading and listening to jazz and not hearing a word is also nice for me. Or being with someone you really want to be alone with all the time, and sharing a comfy bed and not needing many things to be explained.
In any case, I pray, may darkness bring consolation to our hearts, and noise be damned out of our private quarters. May night be forever a refuge and a paradise for us.
In my first post I commented on my motives for writing in English, a language of which I am not a native speaker. I thought I would like to keep writing a little bit about languages, why I find interesting learning more of them, and the few ones I actually know a bit.
Each language you learn is just like discovering a whole new world. The range of possibilities of expression in each language is quite different. Even between languages with a strong similarity and genetic relationship (Indoeuropean languages, for example, the ones I know most about), you can find an infinite field of exploration, from diverse grammatical structures to the neverending subtleties of vocabulary. And to think that what was a sole language in the Late Neolithic (Proto-Indoeuropean) has given rise along six thousand years to Sanskrit, Persian, Hittite, Greek, Latin, Russian, German, English or Welsh... When you start to read in some other language, especially ancient and remote ones, and you can contemplate the very different ways people are able express the very similar essential feelings we all share, a true revelation comes upon you concerning what language means to us humans.
That is because language is fundamental in our self-definition and self-understanding. All our experiences and knowledge are mediated, passed through the filter of linguistic categorization. Language is for us humans a foundation and a boundary without which simply we would not be what we are.
Right now, I study German and Modern Greek mostly, but the languages I feel a greatest affinity for are ancient ones. I love my Ancient Greek (most of all, always) and my Latin, but this past year I have been fortunate enough to take up a bit of Hittite and Coptic (the Ancient Egyptian tongue written by Christians using the Greek alphabet in the last centuries of Antiquity, how cool is that?!). In the past I tried also Biblical Hebrew and Arabic, and it was great. I think Arabic is probably the next one I would be most interested in studying more profoundly, taking in account how extended and culturally relevant it is, both in the past and today.
More than ten years ago, when I was just a teenager, I wrote a blog. It was pretty much a mixed bag, a disordered collection of things I thought about and was interested in. I really like the literary genre, miscellanea.
My head at sixteen and seventeen was messed up. Approaching thirty, I find myself in quite a similar psychological state, and probably that influences my renewed desire to write something, and perhaps to be read by someone.
Two things to begin with:
Firstly, I want to write about many different things. Philosophy, Classics, ancient Christianity; subjects I have formally studied and read somewhat about, and that I sincerely love. But I am not an academic, and my daily engagement with this highly specialized academic subjects is not as big as it was some years ago. So I will write from the point of a view of an enthusiast amateur, and nothing more. Other things I want to write about: books, languages, films, music, videogames, places, people... probably anything I think about can show up here.
Secondly, the language used to write this blog will be English, which needs explaining since I am not a native English speaker. I love my mother tongue, Spanish, and most of my previous writing has been in that language. But I read a whole lot since years ago in English, every day. It is the only tongue I feel really confident communicating with, other than Spanish. So I would like this blog to be kind of an exercise in English writing for me, adding with that the possibility of reaching a global readership. English is today's κοινέ, and I love κοινέ. (This is one of the messed up things I will constantly do in this blog, throwing out Greek words anytime I can.) My English prose will be idiosyncratic, but I like it that way. I am a guy from Andalucía, Spain, trying to write quite extensively in English. Just like a first century Palestinian Jew trying to write Greek, or something like that...
