“But it's just because the chances are all against you,
just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.
Day by day. No yesterdays and no tomorrows.”
- Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer
Isthmus
The Isthmus I am referring to is not a place, but more of a condition, or maybe you can think of it as a certain passage of time. It is a moment in life when the world around you seems to shrink, like a ridge between two oceans, a path that becomes narrower and narrower while the waves are crashing in from both sides and you hope that the waves won't take you, that you are not just walking into the dark sea, but that there are firm grounds to walk on wherever it is that you are going. The book is a diary and it is not. Yes, it is personal, because we see people in intimate situations and we look at things that seem to carry a great meaning, but the images also remain so non-descriptive that it takes an effort to make sense of it all. When I write my own diary, I don’t try to re-narrate my life - I am not making a neat string of pearls. Instead, it is a collection of sporadic sprints, little sketches that carry significance at that point of time, vague impressions that I need to clarify and don’t want to forget. This book is similar in that sense.
