Knowing time.

I’m in my local café having breakfast: coffee and toast.  This place suits my temperament.  There’s nearly always an empty table, Salsa plays on the radio, the waiters and waitresses behind the counter smile physically or psychically their honest welcome and they already know my order.

Café, Madrid, Spain: to me, it’s one place.  To have to leave it all for good would be a kind of death.  It takes all this time to discover how to live, then you find yourself in the shadow of approaching death; of consequences, intended or unintended, emanating from historic choices and their ruptures.

Perfect life?  No.  Nothing in life can be perfect.  Faults: parted from the person I love (a mutual best of both worlds); sleep-deprivation (which wouldn’t be a problem if my days didn’t start so early); lack of social life (down to a painfully slow acquisition of Spanish – entirely my fault).

So what does this life give me? 

Time (and temperament).  Time (ok, and health) is the all-important ingredient to quality of life – so much maligned and undermined in the work-obsessed Anglo-Saxon world.  Time allows me to think; to find out a little more about myself (ok, as does plunging headlong into the deep-end to sink or swim – swimmers learn a lot about themselves).   It allows me to contemplate my situation; to conceive of new things to try; to open doors into rooms I didn’t know were there.

A friend sent me Colin Wilson’s “The Outsider”.  A surprise Christmas present.  I’m ploughing through it in the sleep-deprived night hours and in cafes like this one.  I confess to feeling awkward with some of Wilson’s extrapolations and generalisations and I’ve since found out from Danny and from the Internet (see the Guardian obit.) that these flaws in the book were eventually the undoing of Wilson's reputation, which was killed-off by the same people who heralded his arrival.  But I’m still reading, and it’s prompting me to think and reflect on the heroes(?) of “Nausea”, “The Stranger” and so on.  It’s opening a few more shutters through which to contemplate the world.

I’m no literary expert – I’m not even a great reader – but, by luck and Danny’s reading-list, I’ve encountered some of the texts Wilson offers-up.  I’d throw in Kerouac for good measure, having spent more time than I should have in that author’s company.  “We know time” says Neal Cassady in his various guises through the manic chatter of Kerouac’s typewriter.

Yes.  We know time.  And having to give it up will be a kind of death.