It's All Happening, or: The World is an Onion

I watched a movie tonight. Normally this event would occur and be promptly forgotten, What makes this event meaningful is that I didn't want to watch a movie tonight. I wanted to go to sleep - I'm exhausted, sleep has been on my mind since the minute I woke up this morning. But I got sucked in and now here it is at 2:30 in the morning and I'm sitting and writing this post.

When I was growing up I had this habit of staying up till all hours of the morning because I was reading a book, I didn't want to/couldn't put it down, even when I knew I would pay for it the next day. I felt that I would lose the story if I stopped reading. I have read hundreds of books, some extraordinary, some outlandish but most of them eminently forgettable. Out of those hundreds I remember very little - a well drawn character perhaps, or a unique twist to a plot, maybe a character quality that I admired, most of it is forgotten. But I can tell you exactly how many books I've stopped reading in the middle (two), where the story was, what the cover looked like, where I got the book, where I put the book down (physical location) and a host of other details. Both of these books definitely fell under the eminently forgettable category.

As my movie watching has ramped up in my life it has (for various reasons) overtaken reading has my primary means of literary intake. Some movies are stunning, some ordinary, most are very bad. Tonights movie was reasonable but nothing extremely special. This coming of age story harped on the theme "It's All Happening". The phrase was used as if it was an absolution, a verbal panacea, giving the speaker the right to be released from every responsibility normally accorded to mankind. However the most powerful use of the phrase occurred when it was applied to time, as in: "It's all happening now". We have so many people whose only thought is for their career, or college, or their relationships, or their job. We look to the past to understand the future, and look to the future to pay for the past. We hope that the sacrifices we make today will be repaid ten-fold in the future. This isn't about living in the present. This is about the Now.

This isn't about "seizing the moment". This is about taking a moment to think of the uncountable untold stories that are going on around you right now. This is about the indescribable beauty of the split second that just whizzed past you that can never be replicated.

One of my favorite authors is Salman Rushdie. The first time I finished a novel of his I sat stock still for a solid half hour because I was amazed at what I had just read. Rushdie had achieved a literary representation of the texture of the world. To this day I struggle describing exactly how I feel about that particular book - I have never read anything that showed the story of the world so accurately - how everything related to everyone, how the urchin in the street caused the kingdom to rise, how the kingdom allowed a girl in, how the girl influenced a shopkeeper, who ran the urchin over, all without anybody having any knowledge of each other. Many of my favorite movies have similar layered qualities to them. My favorite poem is John Donne speaking of the interconnectivity of man. I am amazed at the story of the world, how the world connects, how it moves, how it teaches and how it runs.

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."