3resilience

Been getting on with Winterson's The Stone Gods, and am nearing the end with the impression that it's not as good as Gut Symmetries. She writes like she has a responsibility, which makes her terribly self-conscious. The turns of phrase that made me so enraptured in my first Winterson now seem so contrived, as if she were an amateur trying to emulate another artist, which happens to be her younger self. The themes are in the same vein as the rest of her work - love, apathy, science, free will, what makes life worthwhile, and above all, communication. But there really is nothing new, and she doesn't manage to innovate on her past techniques to offer a new take or maintain the old sharpness. The book is more sci-fi than old-school literature, and not very compelling sci-fi at that. It looks like we're approaching the end of a brief, intense intellectual relationship. Somehow my first Winterson was the one that still leaves me with the deepest impression, and I'm beginning to think that she'll never top that for me, and it's better to leave Gut Symmetries in pride of place and be done with it, rather than to keep reading Winterson books and being disappointed.

What still draws me to this particular story is not something that is specific to Winterson. In it she describes a post-apocalyptic world, what she calls Post-3 War, which is the aftermath of a nuclear war triggered by the polarising effect of the War on Terror. And it's the idea of a post-apocalyptic era that is captivating. Imagine...this great, decadent world with all its wonders and weaknesses, its miracles and depravities that feed off each other, combat each other and sustain each other, reduced to a smoking ruin. Imagine humanity robbed of its epic hopes and epic evils, reduced in a fundamental way to just surviving. It is this narrowing of hopes, this shrinking of horizons, the fall from a high place of both benign and malign greatness that is captivating. It is the idea that we were capable of so much, and yet we only chose to destroy ourselves.

And it's not just destruction. The element of choice is the clincher. Seeing cities burn and populations cut down by a meteorite, by alien invasion and by freak weather may have its poignant moments, but what really grips me is when people decide to destroy themselves. When people deliberately choose war when they know the likely outcome. When they choose decadence and eschew sacrifice. When they choose themselves at the cost of everyone else. It's the waste that strikes me; the squandering of not only your own unbounded realm of potential on the pure basis of existing, and not only the unseen and unseeable future with all its promise and peril, but also the legacy of the past, the achievements that were built up over centuries only to be lost at the cusp of a moment. It's the fragility of humanity, and the brutality of how we treat our unique legacy, that is fascinatingly terrifying. As such, the wilful squander of a single life can be more moving than an act of chance wiping out the planet.

Waste, I think, is the fundamental vice. Translate it up through levels of intellect, make it more sophisticated and elaborate, and you get crime, oppression, murder, war, the end of the world. At the root of it all, I think, is a perception that waste is tolerable, that it is acceptable. But it is not, isn't it? It's becoming increasingly clearer that we can't keep wasting energy, resources, land, the environment. The warnings are out - Earth could turn into a wasteland. But beneath that, at a more essential level, I think there are certain things that cannot be wasted, that cannot be let go so easily for a temporal reward that is negligible in the greater scheme of things. The precious, rare things that can't be wasted are time, trust, sincerity, meaning and comprehension. There is too little of these, too little for us not to treat them carefully, to cherish them and protect them and nurture them.

*

Been looking at various people's photo albums on Facebook, that ultimate friend-espionage tool, as Joel aptly calls it. Focusing on the people that are not here at the moment, and their travels in the great wide world out there. Christmas is coming, and travel plans are developing, and I am wondering where else they will visit next - Reykjavik, Kathmandu, San Francisco, Wollongong? The place names that have the charms of a magic word, the promise of new territories and experiences lying beyond the borders of one's imagination. The prospect of enrichment, or expansion, of learning and comprehension. The conjugation of novelty into appreciation, delight and respect.

I have the itch to go somewhere again, and am grateful that I am going to Australia in a week's time. Finished planning the itinerary for our Australia trip, and am in two minds on how useful it is. On the one hand, planning it has necessitated me doing quite a bit of research, making sure that I'm not going in blind, and giving us a framework to fall back on and propel the trip forwards. On the other hand, planning every day beforehand doesn't leave much room for spontaneous discoveries, moments of epiphany, that kind of romantic thing. It's the difference between what I want to happen, and what can happen. And in the middle somewhere lies the experience of our trip. It's the usual dilemma - how much should you leave open-ended, and how much should you plan, to ensure a baseline worthwhile experience without precluding the possibility of something truly wonderful and out-of-this-world happening?

And after Australia, planning a short hop up to Malacca, and then next year perhaps a hop to KK and a longer trip to Vietnam with the guys. Big plans, and now, it's within our power to realise them. It's a heady time, this. The prospect of becoming something of a traveler after all this time. And the hope that this travel will be done with people who will catalyse it into something even more delightful and worthwhile than we can imagine.