2.17.21

A grey haze shines tepidly into my room from between drawn blinds. It's still cold, wet, murky out there. Only the occasional rushing car or blaring siren breaks the silence. My apartment is at a total standstill. The water pipes dry, the wiring electron-free. As if the world outside is going by and I'm stuck, trapped. 

 

Everything had stopped the previous morning. Lights, fridge, stove, heater. The faucets, with their drip drip drip of still-liquid water, gave my ears something to hear, until that too stopped. Then the real solitude began. It seeped into the imagination, nipping the heels of the cold that pushed against my walls like the ocean does to a steamer, searching, prying for any way in. 

 

It was truly frigid outside. Two days earlier, when I had power, I walked a few blocks on the icy sidewalks. It was around noon. Within minutes my ears were piercingly cold---and I was bearing a beanie. I've never felt those temperatures this far south. I scurried inside to take advantage of the few hours of artificial warmth I had left. 

I began making preparations that day. I filled the bathtub with water. Charged the devices. There was plenty of food because I had moved in just the day before, and my parents bought a load of groceries for me (God bless 'em). But once the utilities shut off, everything seemed sparse. 

I watched my battery life tick away with each use. I felt the air becoming colder by the hour. When I moved my food from the fridge to the balcony, I realized the apartment was fast reaching equilibrium with the outside. At least the food wouldn't spoil. 

I walked into the black hallway outside my apartment door in search of a warm, lit place. Noises echoed through the dark corridors like in a horror movie. A stray laugh, footsteps, sounds my mind conjured up. I barely knew which direction to go in this unfamiliar building. I stumbled around with my phone flashlight, searching for affinity. 

Luckily, I didn't have to go far. The downstairs lobby of the building had power and heat and water. It reminded me of an airport gate. Everyone huddled around the outlets, glued to screens, strangers gathered in modern solidarity. I thought, if this were a movie, these would be the cast of characters the protagonist now must survive with. Luckily, life isn't really so. 

 

In the lobby and my muted apartment, I found lots of time to think. After all, the internet does reach a point of repetitiveness after some time. The only book I had with me was dense philosophy, which didn't really suit my mood. I wrote. I wondered what people in olden days did to keep their active, searching minds stimulated (I can't bring myself to believe their minds were that different from ours). 

I tried to keep note of my thoughts on the circumstances. At times it was scary, funny, annoying, disheartening, eye-opening. It was boring. It kept me on my toes. 

Soon enough, though, I realized this was the world testing me. Seeing if I had the grit and elasticity to trek on even when there was no flicker of light to walk towards. I had to prove myself, to the omniscient and to myself. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was greeted with a slap of cold breeze from the vent and a beeping alarm system at 7:20pm on 2.17.21. A full 35 hours after power went down. I told my mom I felt, in that moment, like a King.

The Alone

There's something alluring about the solitary, introverted character. Yes the independence and freedom, the most radical and obvious of reasons, but so too the mystery of selfhood and pride to defy the crushing universe single-handed.

These are the romantic lonely. Those more connected to themselves than the outside world. Unplugged but tuned in. 

Haruki Murakami seems to simultaneously get the appeal and contribute to it. These types are his bread and butter protagonist, from what of his canon I've read. His stories are emotional at core, very powerful, but the writing is crisp and simple, muted to reflect his stories' inhabitants. The melancholy draws you in, as does the riveting hope for a deserved ending that sometimes comes, sometimes not; for the most part, you are left in a confused state eerily similar in its odd absurdness to the real world. 

The humanity he explores often teeter on the edge of dreamlike and damnable--a challenge to the motif of vicious anger offering instead a resigned, internal reaction to the urbanized, globalized, stratified world. 

I think Murakami's perspective is necessarily created in a Japanese culture where this individual is more common, more a prominent member of society, active in art, than elsewhere. 

This article updated in Jan 2019 says "over a quarter" of people in the US live by themselves. In Japan, this rate has trended downward since the 1980s, with 34.5% in single-person households in 2015. The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates this will hit 40% in 2040. 

 

Artistic expressions of hitorigurashi (living alone in Japanese) seem to create this unique melancholy, a down, bittersweet tone like that in lo-fi beats. It fits in nicely to the depression vibes that Soundcloud rap rides on. 

 

I've only read short stories by Murakami. They feed off the fleeting energy of nostalgia. My friend told me he got 1Q84 recently; turns out it's 928 pages long! I wonder it if tries to sustain the same aura as the short stories for the long haul. Wild that someone can publish both a behemoth like that and thin snippets like After the Quake.

On true isolation: Winter's watch 

On long books: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust is 4,215 pages

Becoming accustomed to Liberties

I think it is nearly impossible for people like myself, the lucky few born and raised in and lifelong residents of nations with robust civil liberties, to understand what it is like to live somewhere without these entrenched rights. 

 

The option to defy the established order, whether religious or political or artistic or historical, is inseparable from our national identity. The existence of that option is our defining characteristic; it is who we are. Imagining ourselves without that option is an exercise in fiction, for it is to imagine a wholly different human being. 

 

I can't begin to describe the ways in which this right influences my life. Everywhere I turn I see others, and thereby myself, taking a stance in the multiverse of ideas. You can make a show like Good Omens that spits on Abrahamic mythology, you can dive deep enough to drown in UFO conspiracies, you can make fun of the most powerful people around, and no one will stop you. There is no grand, overarching force to keep you in check. To reasonable extents, and sometimes even unreasonable (e.g. hate speech cesspools on 4chan), we can get away with thinking and saying whatever we want. 

 

I know this isn't news, and it's all extremely obvious because it's kind of the whole point of "liberal" countries. I just think here, within one of the countries that values free speech, we forget how novel our experience is. 

 

Not only is granting these expansive liberties to the common man a new development in human history, but it's still rare today. I read the news and see a place like Myanmar where millions have been dominated for generations by misinformation, civil war, and a military stranglehold. I watch Putin's Palace (Дворец Путина), the viral film uncovering rampant corruption, and then see the man who made it get nearly three years in a prison camp for his disobedience. 

 

The Human Freedom Index, published by the Cato Institute, uses a measure based on "personal, civil, and economic freedom," to rank countries by respect for human dignity. Their 2020 report found that 15% of people live in the top quartile of countries, while 34% live in the bottom quartile. (The datasets they have online are really extensive, if you want to explore the details more.) Out of 210 countries analyzed by Freedom House for political rights and civil liberties, only 84 were considered "free." 

None of this is to say that progress isn't being made, or that "free" countries truly respect every individual's rights, or that things are necessarily better for everyone in certain parts of the world compared to others. 

I'm not sure what exactly I'm trying to say. But when I think of the North Korean woman born into a cold bubble as far from me in every respect as the Moon, I imagine, futile as it may seem, what I would be like if I was her. And this painful mental exercise affirms in me that she, like me, deserves to take her own stance in the multiverse of ideas. For everyone to have that option, when I think about it, is really the highest of high ideals we should be striving for.