April 11
Once I dreamt I was a butterfly, glad and light. Then I woke — and was Zhuangzi. Now I do not know: am I a human being who dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly that is now dreaming of being human?
The True Book of the Southern Land of Blossoms (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Once I dreamt I was a butterfly, glad and light. Then I woke — and was Zhuangzi. Now I do not know: am I a human being who dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly that is now dreaming of being human?
After a few weeks somewhere else you come back, and your flat seems strangely unfamiliar. The keys are where they always are. Still, everything looks as if someone who resembles you had been living here. For a day or two you take the other version of yourself for the real one: slower, more curious, less busy.
Then everyday life returns. After a week the trip is a pleasant exception, and you are once again someone who gets up early and knows where the forms are kept.
What is remarkable is that both certainties feel the same. Each state takes itself for the normal one and the other for the deviation. The feeling of being entirely yourself goes with you into both, and for that very reason it cannot decide between them.
You could look for a standpoint outside from which this might be settled. But that attempt, too, would take place in one of the two lives, at a particular table, at a particular time.
Sometimes, when you reach for the keys in the morning, the quiet of those weeks comes back to you. Then it doesn't feel like a memory.
