The Night

...and so, with the end of June comes the end of my tenure at URA.

It has been fun, after all. At the end of it, looking back over seven weeks of internship, I have to admit that it has been more helpful and more useful than I had originally expected. Like I said before, it has been fun, and it has been enriching, and beyond that, there is not a whole lot more that I can rightly ask of them. These people, I feel, will be good to work with, and that will make the work we do acceptably engaging. Thankfully, therefore, over the last seven weeks, I have come to feel that I can honestly say that the choice that I have made has been the right one. And, for the moment, that is enough.

Taking the bus down Robinson Road towards City Hall, I usually sit on the right side of the bus so that I can look at the traffic and the skyscrapers that front Shenton Way to the South. And yesterday, with the experience of seven weeks of URA behind me, suddenly I felt once again the kind of fascination and anticipation that I had felt so keenly two years ago, when I was fond of gazing at the skyline from the now-demolished outdoor theatre at the Esplanade. The buildings that we throw up into the sky, the mighty flanks and gleaming surfaces, are audacity itself; and somehow, they seem stretched and taut, filled with the tension of bridging the earth and the sky, of traversing the past and the future. Suddenly, it was once again clear that this place was full of potential, and that we stand upon the very brink of realising it. It is exhilarating, and it is invigorating.

And, in that moment, it became clear once again that this is the place that I will need to be, and that, seeing all this, you cannot rightly say no to it.

*

Yesterday evening, went to watch Michaelangelo Antonioni's The Night at the Museum. It is a breathtaking film, sumptuous in its sensations, profound in its connotations. There is a fantastic scene in the first part of the film, when the wife gets bored or exasperated of her writer husband's book-signing function, and decides to wander around Milan to pass the time. There are shots of her strolling along a street, tiny against the massive modern blocks of new Milan; there are moments when she pauses to stare at this or the other interesting denizen, only to hurry away when the subject of her study suddenly, sharply, stares back. She wanders into abandoned buildings huddled at the feet of crisp new blocks, touches the worn surfaces, feeling the plaster and the paint crumbling under her fingers. She encounters a child crying in a decrepit courtyard, a couple of men guffawing in midstride (which brings an irrepressible smile to her face), a man beating up another in a deserted field, another group of boys firing rockets into the afternoon air - in short, all the random and wonderful encounters that cities can offer one if one approaches them without any preconceptions.

And yet, while there is certainly wonderment, there is also a feeling of isolation, of being an outsider looking inwards surreptitiously. The couple observes the world around them while standing apart. The strangers on the street do not talk to them, except for the most mundane of transactional conversations. They can hardly talk to each other; they constantly ask each other to clarify what each is saying, and the other mostly replies noncommitally, either unable to find the correct words to express themselves, or unable to find the conviction to express themselves truthfully to the other in the first place.

But the ironic tension comes from their awareness of their own need to connect with the other, with someone else. They possess an acute self-consciousness of that need; and that self-consciousness prevents them from being satisfied with the quotidian sundry interactions that other people are content to use to satisfy that need. One gets the impression that they feel somewhat fraudulent when they resort to such a thing as small-talk in their search for a connection; and, being deprived of the ability to commit themselves completely to the comfort that lies in superficiality, they end up focusing on their aching isolation from each other. And so we have these two people, suffering from a surfeit of reflectiveness, trying and trying to find a way to shock themselves and each other into feeling some kind of genuine, unalloyed emotion, going so far as to skirt the borders of infidelity, and then finding themselves drawn to the other again, through forces that are both within and outside their will.

There is another good scene, when the wife speaks candidly to a younger girl who has become the husband's new romantic interest. She said something along the lines of how she had wanted to die that night, to fade into nonexistence. I don't quite remember the exact meaning of the lines, but I have the impression that she is saying that it would be better to not exist at all than to be forced to endure the lingering anguish of not feeling anything genuine. And she can't even bring herself to condemn the husband or the girl for their would-be tryst, because she can see so clearly where they are coming from, and cannot find anything culpable in what she sees as a natural impulse. And in a masterful move, the scene ends with the husband and the wife both kissing the girl goodbye, in one fell swoop throwing the film out of the orbit of the conventional.

I do find it hard to describe the film or its plot, because it is dense with meanings, and I am not sure which one is the most important one, and which can be discarded as less significant. But I will say this much: it is a film of sensations and of impressions. This is something that Antonioni is able to do masterfully; he is able to transmit meanings not so much through symbols and words and characters, but through the patterns that he creates between the symbols, words and characters. And in these patterns I find a messge that is compelling to me; in these patterns lie signposts that seem to point to a self-evident truth of living in full awareness of the world around you.