Sense of an Ending

I just finished Julian Barnes' Sense of an Ending in 3 MRT trips; making it a breeze compared to Kerouac. The book talks a lot about the fallacy of our memories, how we live in a reality that we want to believe in.

The author puts it succinctly - “History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated. The book contains enough twists in its 180 pages to worth a read.

What it made me think about are the choices we make in life. The protagonist is a man in his sixties, recalling (albeit in a manner that was incongruent to the truth) his youth and how an event in his life now dug out painful revelation that he had hidden over the years.

Leading a pedestrian life in which he neither regretted nor thought much about, the reader wonders how his/her own life has been glazed over by lies we tell ourselves. What-ifs hang heavy, events that our minds interpreted may not have had happened the way we remembered. Perhaps it is a form of self-preservation, a cocoon that we wrap ourselves in. Plenty thoughts, more time needed to digest this.

On The Way

Took me more than two months to plough through Kerouac's On The Road. It's not a heavy book but the style didn't gel with me, despite it being hailed as a literary great, the embodiment of the beat generation and the inspiration to a host of authors/musicians.

That said, a story of how a young man criss-crossed across a post-war America, taking in sights of an important period in history, capturing the zeitgeist of a time past, did fill me with a slight sense of adventure but mostly, I felt a certain dread...how characters in the book lived with careless abandon and no aims; just drifting through the rafters and floating down the river on a rubber tube.

Ironically, one could say that living with a plan ain't living at all, if you get my drift. How has that plan worked out for you?

This morning a certain fear shook me awake, that the big three-oh is but a paltry eighteen months away. When this blog was started, when I started publicly documenting my thoughts and snippets of my life, this junction seemed so far away - about a decade already? How time flies and where are we going but towards the inevitability of death? Obviously an intellectual/pseudo-philosophical question like this bears no fruit, save or more wasted time and pointless conversations over coffee.

The greatest insight that I gleaned recently is that each one of us has got a purpose here. It is up to you if you want to listen, if you want to hear what God is speaking to you. We may end up detouring, going in circles before finding our answers but when you arrive there, you will know.. You will know that your life just started.