Letters from Vietnam 36

17^th October 2006 – 10:04 – HCMC

As soon as I woke up, I realized that I lost Lodge’s novel which I was planning to read and finish in the bus. Technically, it was not lost because I knew where I left it in the bus. With the disappointment of darkness in the bus, I put the book in the pocket of the front seat. Then, it must be still there if nobody found it late… It was bad for me because there were only 20 pages to finish the novel and now the only thing I can do is to imagine the rest of the story myself…

After having a shower, I went outside and made a few phone calls. First, I went to meet with a Turkish friend, H. I have never met him before ad we knew each other from the e-mail group which has been set up for Turkish people living in Thailand. We sat and talked about various things. He is one of the few people reading my blog and even commenting. I went to buy more books from Dasa. I looked for my lost book so I can sit and read there until I finish the novel but they did not have another copy. I bought two books from Ben Okri and a novel from David Park. Park’s novel is called “The Big Snow” and on the cover, it says “if you liked McEwan’s “Atonement”, you will adore this.” I did not read “Atonement” but I read “The Daydreamer” and “Enduring Love” from Mc Ewan and I enjoyed both of them. The story reminds me Pamuk’s “Snow” but I think in essence it is very different… This is more about family affairs, the silence of snow and a murder. At least, this one is not political.

When I looked at the cover of the book, I wished there could be snow, which can cover my past. I wish I had a storm inside me and that storm brings some kind of snow which can smooth all the turbulences, all the fluctuations and all the vexations of my life… Snow, in its silence and potential power to hide the differences is a unique image for literature people. It covers all the differences, all the ugly scenes and all the undesired effects of the past. Before it snows; usually the cold weather and storm send people to indoors. Then, the sound becomes nothing as if there is only the snow on the earth. The crowd of the cities, the honks of cars, screams of children disappear. People prefer to stay at home and enjoy watching how the snow wipes out everything visible and create a new world which is temporary in every perspective. Soon later, all the artificial differences become invisible to bare eyes so the whole world becomes “one thing” as if just created. This “one thing” is actually what many humanist philosophers dreamed as the only future of the human kind to survive. Under the snow, it does not matter the type of the soil or the quality of the road. Before anybody walks on the snow, it seems like nobody lived on this earth and nobody will live. The smoothness of the surface, the brightness of the snow tells thousands of stories about loneliness, abandonment and worthlessness. Because we can not differentiate the differences any more, the temporary equality of all things in the nature makes the world more liveable and even more loveable.

However, I knew that the snow inside will be more deadly than snow outside. To forget the past, to ignore all the priorities and to wipe out the devil appearances will not make me a happier person. It is because I am who I am with my past experiences and whenever I wipe my past, I wipe myself. This is one of the reasons why the idea of heaven is absurd. In heaven, we are not supposed to get bored. This means, there will be no boring times in heaven. But this also means that there will be no pleasure because we can know pleasure by only denying boredom. If we wipe out all the undesired characteristics of a person, he will not be a “human” any more. He might be called “angel” but not “human” since we are product of antagonist/dialectical powers inside us. I will be definitely rejecting to be a person who is not be able to think of bad things because that person will not be me. In this case, the heaven will be full of zombies who are incapable of doing what they want just because their free will has been cleared by a snow storm before entering the kingdom of God.

I left the bookstore and went to meet another friend. In the evening, I had dinner in front my hotel. The cook was a woman whose right hand was amputated. She was cooking with her left hand but she seemed a happy woman. Her husband and her child were around her, helping her to run the business. I looked at her deeply, talked with her about the daily things and definitely admired her hard-working. With these poor conditions, she was not making problem to anyone and working for her family. I was a little bit ashamed of myself. Probably, I make at least 5 times more money than she makes and probably I have more things to make me happy in this life, I always look at the empty part of the glass and complain. This is what tyring to be western minded makes me. Thai people are usually satisfied with what they have in their lives and they do not complain much with the things the do not have. Of course, there are people who are happy only with money everywhere in the world, especially in big cities but generally speaking, Thailand deserves the reputation of land of smiles with the people who enjoy the simple lives and traditions. She lost her right hand but she knows how to keep her spirit high by forgetting her lost hand and keeping her work with left hand. This is the secret of happiness. As I mentioned above, the snow already smoothed her past and with her family she can look at he future with hope…

During the dinner, I met with an Australian guy, P, who was a supporter of Hitler. I did not like him and I did not want to argue with him about Holocaust. He showed me the anti-Semitic tattoos on his body. One of hem was saying: Death to Zionism. I tried to change the topic of our conversation to different things like football –with an Australian guy!!!- or Thailand. Then he said he had a trouble with a young girl in recent days and it costed him 25,000 Baht. Apparently, the girl got pregnant and he had to pay for the expenses of abortion. I left him on the dinner table with his bottle of beer and fried scorpion/insects. I went to my room, read a few pages from the biography of Kafka and fell in sleep very easily.

Next morning, I woke up late and around 11 am, left the hotel for the airport. This time my experience with the airport was easier. The only problem I had was the difficulty of finding a public phone which works properly. I tried four telephones and none worked. At the end, in the room where we are supposed to wait for the airplane, I found a public phone and it worked. I called J and told her that I am safely boarding the airplane. She wished me good luck. Then, a few minutes later I was on the clouds with the following –somehow familiar- paragraphs from Kafka’s letter to Oskar Pollak:

“But it does one good when the conscience receives extensive wounds, because they make it more sensitive to each prick. I believe, one should read only the books that bite and sting. If a book we are reading, doesn’t wake us up with a punch on the head, what are we reading it for? … We need the books which affect us like a disaster, which pain us deeply, like the death of someone dearer to us than ourselves, like being lost in the woods, far from everyone, like suicide, a book must be the axe for the frozen sea in us.”

It is interesting that Kafka uses the metaphor of “lost in the woods” very often. In his another letter to Pollak, he writes this:

We are abandoned like lost children in the woods. When you stand and look at me, what do you know of the pain within me and what do I know of yours?

I will write about Kafka in coming days…