Reading By The Pond On A Slow Sunday Noon

The one thing that’s keeping me well within the boundaries of sanity is the recognition that this chapter of my life will likely never happen again. It’s a kernel of a thought that makes its infrequent passing known with a supersonic bang, echoing within my bones, screaming at the highest pitch to look at this, it’ll never be this good again. And it speaks truth: much as it is stressful to burn through tens of journal articles for only one or two sentences added to my thesis draft, and lonely as it is (for now) to be living in a concrete box by my lonesome separated by the Pacific from all I’ve ever loved and treasured, life right now is free and full of potential. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so strongly that the world is my oyster.

I spent yesterday the way I’ve come to enjoy my Sundays. After a breakfast of coffee, three croissants and a few slices of French brie (bought at the Aeon mall during their pre-closing discount), I made use of the early morning to catch up on some light work. I didn’t bother cooking. When lunchtime rolled around, I took my kindle, wallet, and apartment keys with me and strolled to the konbini for a light lunch. I had two onigiri and some convenience store fried chicken. Outside the convenience store, I found a vending machine selling small cups of sparkling lemonade for a hundred yen each. From there, I then made my way to the university’s koi pond.

Like I told my wife recently, the PhD is pretty much three years of being free to be as pretentious and esoteric as you like. Like ancient confucian scholars, except I run no risk of being killed by an autocratic emperor that’s just risen to power and therefore wants to nip any revolutionary discourse in the bud (although, now that I think about it, you never can be sure). True to form, at the koi pond I found a bench under the shade and proceeded to eat my lunch while reading King Lear on my kindle.

Why King Lear is a note in itself: my favorite show right now, Succession, has just reached its series finale and so I need a temporary entertainment fix until I find something else to fill the void. I gathered from the subreddits that the series writers were, in some ways, making a modern-day corporate King Lear (the title does make the show’s primary traffic of leadership change in a company something regal, even imperial) and in fact, almost every discourse leading up to the finale were trying to use the outcomes of Shakespeare’s tragedy (non-spoiler alert: everybody dies) to predict how Jesse Armstrong and company will conclude the show.

We have seen the best of our time:
machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
ruinous disorders, follow us quietly to our
graves…

King Lear, Act I Scene 2

Beyond giving Succession vibes, the play ended up being a perfect counterpoint to the relaxed pace of the morning so far. Gloucester’s monologue in the first act, grieving what he sees as the terminus of the kingdom’s glory days, reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line, “I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.” Sure, there is hardly a comparison between the bloody end of regime and the melancholic whims of a young college boy, but they both represent the ever-present fear that lies just under the calm surface of the day, barely hidden by the dappled sunlight. It’s the fear that this, too, shall pass.