Remembrances?

“Solitude is good to create, but live-threatening. Nostalgia is convenient to recall, but not for immersing yourself fully in it. Happily, you always have at your side and with you a book.” (Rosa Avellaneda). 

 

Where could I go today? I am now like I was in Lima some years ago, when I left my house for going to nowhere place. It was -it is still- a wonderful time for me, it does not matter what kind of troubles I could have had before, it does not matter what kind of profits, benefits or blessings I could get these running days. Life is an eternal searching of happiness, and everyone has his own idea about what happiness is. Right or wrong, everybody is going - or would like to go- towards what he / she does not have in his/her life... Life is a game of possibilities. You must always have something else for getting. When we reach ours goals it is not the end of all, but it is the beginning because a new path opens for us, and there are other goals for being gotten. Maybe we could say -paraphrasing the Rolling Stones-, that there is not full satisfaction but in advance, in always advance into the future, into the horizon that is beyond our present. We can reach happiness, but we need to follow it every instant of our lives... what we need mostly is feelings, sensations, positive thoughts and reflections. Material things do not give us happiness, tough they are part of it and we cannot ignore them. Buddha and Lao Tzu needed material things, in very little proportion it is true, but needed them (Buddha begged what he needed)... What kind of fantasy do we like to live? Since I was a child I wished to live in different parts of the world, and I could do it, but only in my imagination that was not so fruitful like Julio Verne's, nevertheless I was able to do it, to travel any place I wanted, reading all kind of book of adventures. Like don Quixote's, my life was peaceful, almost always, until I could start to make my adventurous life coming true, coming out from fantasy, and that was only possible when I left San Marcos University where I was a professor. Life was my own Rocinante. I took the path that life chose for me, though I thought it was me who did. I was crazy, I know... It was endings of 1979 when I left New York and came from Lima. I wished to take the illegal aliens route and I did it. I left my house and my bedroom where I had my beloved books, books that I was reading all the time. Now I do it in the same way as before - in my precious solitude... Time does not pass in my life since I am here. The city where I am living, as I said before, is New York. From the beginning -I mean: the first time I was here- I discovered that there is no other city like it. Here are living more than 130 different cultures from around the world. That is what fascinates me most of all... I live in a big reality that immerse emerges from fantasy (this city is called "The Big Apple"). You can see New York, using Shakespeare’s opus title, as you like it. You can find in this big city everything you want to get, good or bad, but you need to understand it, to know it, looking at it in a different way you are accustomed to. This is another country, a different culture where are living people of different parts of the world, and you can see their own characters. I know the immigrant sufferings because I myself have suffered since my beginnings here. I know the immigrant joys because I myself have being joyful here... I saw my face hiding where the storm is permanent. I was inside it. I was smiling in spite of all the bad moments I have lived. I have always known that the life we live -good and bad- are not for other people's life but for us, they are for ourselves that are happy or sad, and maybe we are not accustomed to live different lives, to live other, different, lives than we had in our home countries. Life has different faces, we need to know how to confront each one of them... It is ludicrous to be so many years thinking in the past, living in the past, but we do it in spite of all. I can see it every day not only in myself but in different kind of immigrants long since I am living in this country. … For intellectual people accustom to live here is more difficult yet, because they are accustomed to be alone, they are reading, writing, thinking, and talking with themselves. It's a crazy life –just like don Quixote's-, I know, and I have seen many of them (I mean people thinker) changing their way of lives looking for a different one or, simply, trying to run away from their every time life they do not support, they do not like, and do not desire. They left their country for a better life... What is a better life for them? Maybe they want to look for a way of life they do not know after all. They are like Goethe’s "Faust" that looks for a different life only to realize, after a time living it, that they are wrong in their searching. But they did it in spite of their thoughts, in spite of their feelings... My fantasy was transformed in my reality once upon a time... and it was very hard... I am remembering my father now. I have gotten him in my mind for a long time. The image I have had of him is when he is listening his pocket radio while he was walking down the streets. Then, I needed... I thought that I had to buy a pocket radio like his. Well, now I get a pocket radio like I he had: same size, same color, and same brand. For me all this is beautiful. It is a bit of my father's material presence in my life. It gives me some happiness, some joy. It helps me to walk in this every day difficult path...