Category: prose

an oil painting showing a fox walking in the middle of a city and turning its head to look back at the viewer

Journal (A little gem found in the ashes)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

There are films I watch for a single scene only, but to appreciate that scene, you have to see the whole film. Like the one in Marianna Palka’s Motherhood, also known as Egg, where conceptual artist Tina asks Karen, her friend since art school, who is now eight months pregnant and came with her husband to visit her, just as the guests were about to leave her apartment, to send her a picture of Elliot when he is born, thus reviling the gender of the expected child to the father. It may sound unremarkable, but it’s not. That single scene in an otherwise mediocre film is like a little gem found in the ashes, as beautiful as unexpected. And it’s the same in life, with those rare moments we encounter in the currents of everyday mundanity. We tend to forget them quickly, but eventually learn to treasure them and cling to them like a lifebuoy.

It reminds me of the words of George Falconer, the protagonist in A Single Man played masterfully by Colin Firth, who says in the dénouement: “A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp. And the world seems so fresh, as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realise that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”

And the most important part is that these moments are derivatives of our perception, not expenditures. We don’t have to travel thousands of miles or spend a substantial amount of money. All that is required is a slight shift in optics, perhaps some fine-tuning of the soul. And then even exchanging a glance from a distance with a fox in the middle of the city during an evening stroll takes on a transcendental dimension.

an oil painting showing ancient Athenians debating in the agora

Journal (The doorway to wisdom)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom, as Doctor Mirabilis once said, so over the many years of my school education, I learned, or rather, tried to learn, Russian, German, French, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek. In the end, I only managed to scrape a smidgen of English, and even this was only after I moved to Scotland as an adult. On the other hand, one could repeat after Anne Dreydel that there’s no point in speaking many languages if you have nothing interesting to say in any of them. And for that, you need something more than just repetition of random facts approved by some Ministry of Education official, which, as Michel de Montaigne rightly noted, only stuffs the memory and leaves the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

Since there is no way, for obvious reasons, of joining the bunch following Socrates, the second best I could do was study philosophy at the university, which was my plan if I hadn’t failed my matriculation examination—the maths part, to be precise (my literary essay turned out to be one of the best of the year, so I clearly placed emphasis on the wrong part of my education). I passed it two years later, after leaving the army, but it was too late to pursue the original plan. I had to put on the braces of adulthood and get a job, which was a lesson of a sort. But I never really forgot about it, and from time to time, I tried to study philosophy on my own. The problem was that the books I read either bored me immensely or were too difficult to understand, so at some point, I just gave up.

A few years after coming to Scotland, when I finally managed to achieve a level of English that allowed me to read newspaper articles and technical texts at work with relative ease, I reached for a novel, but it was a total fiasco. And then, by sheer chance, I came across The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno. It was an e-book, so reading it on one of those fancy e-readers with a built-in dictionary that lets you see the definition of a word if you highlight it turned out to be a delight. Following that one, I started searching for more using the phrase “philosophical essays.” Soon after, I also managed to find a few second-hand bookshops with shelves dedicated to philosophy. With every book I read, my appetite increased.

But then, at one point, I reached a limit. It was soon after I finished reading The Essential Plato, with an introduction by Alain de Botton. I bought Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. I tried to read it. I really did, but it was just too much. I gave up after about eighty pages. The next failure was Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives, although this time I persevered and made it two-thirds of the way through the book before giving up. So, now I know my limits and that I’m not going to be a philosopher or a philosophy scholar. But I can still enjoy a book of essays by A. C. Grayling, or the aforementioned Alain de Botton, or even Michel de Montaigne, although Charles Cotton’s seventeenth-century English is not easy to read, probably even for a native speaker.

an oil painting depicting a modern Japanese couple drinking tea at a table

Journal (The itchy scar)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

It’s puzzling how easily “I do” becomes past imperfect tense, and despite all the anger, regret, or whatever other feeling prevails, you have to let it go. And you do. Eventually. After all, it is not without reason that they say time heals wounds. But the itchy scar will remain for life. And like the good grammarian you are, you will continue to look for syntactic sugar to alleviate the bitterness of that new cup of tea you have managed to brew, hoping that someone will be tempted to join you at five with a platter of madeleines and one day help you scratch that itch.

an oil painting showing a group of people playing a board game

Journal (A gracious AI or an obnoxious human)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I’ve never been into games. I find them dreary, but they also require interaction with other people, and that’s a challenging endeavour for me. For most of my life, I stayed on the sidelines, observing others running like lab rats in a maze, which proved convenient when I started working for newspapers. That’s probably why I became a journalist in the first place, as it embraced this habit of mine, allowing me to make a living out of it while at the same time feigning involvement in the affairs of others, at least up to the final punctuation mark, so I could for a little while convince myself that the detachment from the real world that I have always felt is nothing but my imagination. However, one may ask oneself what is more desirable: indifferent reliability or compassionate inadequacy (knowing people, they would aim for compassionate reliability—what a greedy creature human is). But it turns out that if you sugarcoat the former with an impression of sympathy, we are more than happy to embrace it, like the Diplomacy board game players, who were happier to lose to gracious AI than obnoxious human players (see What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? by Virginia Heffernan in Wired magazine).

oil painting showing a man working at a desk in his bedroom.

Journal (A history lesson in real life)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

So it started again—the Scottish rainy, windy, cold autumn—and since the walls of the building I live in have no insulation whatsoever, just like last year, I locked myself in the small bedroom, moving there also my desk, as it’s the only room in my flat that is actually possible to heat up to some sensible temperature. The larger bedroom that I normally use as an office, with the radiator turned on full, can barely hold twelve-ish degrees during the winter. So, for the next several months, my bedroom will be my nest—or a prison cell, depending on the perspective we look at this arrangement from.

On a positive note, I can say that it gives me a good insight into the living conditions of the very first inhabitants of this place. Like a history lesson in real life, where the daily ablutions are a particularly interesting experience. But, as they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. However, one could expect that, after a hundred and twenty years or so, something would change. Insulating the walls of buildings in the cold north seems so obvious. Perhaps having expectations is a mistake on my part.

an oil painting showing an old woman working on a farm

Journal (Standing next to the coffin)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Everyone’s going to die. It takes a philosopher or a desperate teenager to say this. Everyone else who should be able to address the topic is likely to ditch it. I’ve never understood why the subject of death is seen as depressing. Of course, there is nothing to celebrate for obvious reasons, but since death is an inevitable part of life, we should at least treat it with equanimity.

I remember when my father died. On the day of his funeral, my grandmother asked me to take a picture of her standing next to the coffin. At the time, I found her request absolutely bizarre. I’ve never been particularly fond of taking pictures in the first place, but such an occasion seemed even less suitable to capture in a photo. And yet here I was, satisfying her request as if we were at a family picnic, having fun. But maybe that was exactly the approach to death I have now. If we photograph birthdays, weddings, holiday trips, and every other event in our lives, then why not funerals? What’s so strange about that? After all, it’s just another life event.

My grandmother lived in a small village, far from any city, and I never perceived her as a philosophising type. The few memories I have of her are related to her work on the farm. Perhaps I should have talked to her more when I still had the chance. Who knows what I would have learned from her? It’s sad that we learn to appreciate people only when they are no longer with us.

An oil painting showing an African-American actress with an Oscar at the Academy Awards

Journal (People like us)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski2 Comments

It is difficult to see actors as real people, flesh and blood, with their own ordinary lives and problems, because we only see them on the silver screen, in tabloids and gossip columns of glossy magazines. Once they emerge from the shadow of anonymity, with all the glamour of their immaterial lives, we give them the status of demigods. Even their life in the afterlife would have some special dimension, even if it was hell—see Wings of Fame with Peter O’Toole and Colin Firth.

Therefore, it is even more shocking when it turns out that they are subject to the same randomness of fate as each and every one of us. Just like today, when I was watching The Revengers’ Comedies, I saw the familiar face of a young actress who I remember from Four Weddings and a Funeral—Charlotte Coleman. In the latter, she was like a funny, pretty little gem. So intrigued, as I haven’t seen her for a while, especially in any newer production, I decided to check what she was up to nowadays. I was saddened when it turned out that she died in 2001, at the age of only 33, which I didn’t know. Moreover, her life was marked by the tragic death of her boyfriend.

So, it’s worth remembering that despite their peculiar profession, actors are just people—people like us.

an oil painting showing a pianist during a concert

Journal (Moonlight Sonata)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

While watching the film Clara by Akash Sherman today, I heard a fragment of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on the soundtrack, and I felt like listening to the whole piece. Later, in the evening, I chose a random performance, but the first movement was played so flatly and emotionlessly, like a chore, that I quickly turned it off. It was just painful to listen to. Beethoven was probably turning in his grave, speaking figuratively. However, I did not give up and found a recording of Claudio Arrau’s concert from 1970, during which he played this sonata. You could hear the difference immediately. It’s hard to believe that both pianists had the same score in front of their eyes. But this should come as no surprise, given that Arrau is considered one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century.

an oil painting showing a thinker among books

Journal (A bowl of petunias)

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Waking up in the middle of the night with a pain in my chest always reminds me of my mortality. It’s not like I think about death all the time, but touching on the subject with such an emphatic reminder is inevitable. At least I’m not superstitious like my father was, who, when asked about making a will in the face of cancer, became really upset, treating the suggestion as a wish for his death. But maybe I just had more time to get used to my condition. After all, I was born with it.

Perhaps it’s a lack of imagination on my part, but the idea of dying has never terrified me. And not because of my Catholic upbringing, with the morbid theatrics of Ash Wednesday and the promise of the resurrection of the dead that I never consciously believed in, not since I left the innocence of childhood. I simply find existence itself rather mundane and prefer to think of myself more as a bowl of petunias than a sperm whale, if I were to refer to Douglas Adams’s iconic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.