Lost in Translation and Nostalgia

I'm into George Orwell these days. I don't know why I want to revisit 1984. I guess it has something to do with the fact that I was reminded of a smart student I used to have who used to wear a black t-shirt with '1984' on it. I remember wanting to smirk every time he made comments. My word! He was so original and so wise. And every time I had to work so hard to resist my usual reply, 'How does one get to think like you? You're brilliant, brilliant.' Instead, every single time and without fail, I would simply and much professorially say 'hmm, interesting point. Thanks.'

Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm proving myself right yet again when it comes to my often too tedious a point that good sociality can only occur when surrounded by those who share a number of cultural references. To feel gotten we need to expand our circles regardless of how great we think they are. But back to the black t-shirt boy.

Other classmates would ask him whether '1984' was his year of birth and annoyingly he would say 'NO!' thus, in a way sort of leave it at that. I remember wanting to divorce myself from objectivity for a quick second to interject some kind of answer about the contextual meeting of his t-shirt. Luckily, in hindsight, I didn't. It's best to just observe a few things and let them happen while resisting the urge to 'improve.' Some things are meant to be left untouched and/or unedited.

I'm watching Lost in Translation tonight as I do the other favorite activities of the evening. As much as evening sociality comes with its perks, my favorite part of the day is that space at night when all I can hear is the sound of my own thoughts mixed with whatever indie rick band I'm playing in the other room(s).

I often revisit Lost in Translation as it's filled with a number of important texts in my own existence. When it first came out, I remember resisting watching it. One of my grad school friends, a fellow nerd with a strong sense of high fashion, kept insisting that I watch it. However, I kept saying, 'Yeah, let's not.' I don't know why I resorted to that kind of puerile response but I guess we're bound to revert to childhood patterns regardless of how smart and informed we think we may become. However, after my friend relented, I did watch Lost in Translation. I didn't just like it. I felt gotten while watching it. Having lived in different countries much of my life, I felt I got the essence of the film.

Granted, my experience doesn't mirror that of the characters' as I've never lived in Tokyo. What I still have in common with the film is the way it captures the poetry of sadness that disconnectedness brings with it. There's no way to capture disconnectedness by words. I truly believe that you can only capture it via a commonality of experience.

Lost in Translation used to be the kind of film I would watch as a way of curing my insomnia. It would relax me, sort of like Wonder Boys and Tootsie can. This time however, I can sense quite a bit of creative fecundity while listening to traces of music from the other room, taking in the dialog of the film, and thinking what the heck transpired during the day today.

I don't know why I keep going back to my usual things. It's always Dante, Lost in Translation, J. M. Coetzee, or Schnitzler. And yet, my fascination with novelty does not get weaker by time. On the contrary, the older I get, the more I crave for more of it. I suppose it's a way to combat repetitive patterns. Repetition, is a double-edged sword, after all. It not only leads to expertise and enhanced ability but also boredom. And the latter is the one thing that manages to scare me almost as much as Inferno 5.

And yet Lost in Translation could never bore me. It, much like the beginning of a great connection and human story, gets better and more appealing with time. Every time I watch it, it brings me back to 2004, the year of the beginning of my actual self-actualization. And how could such a text ever become inconsequential?! Not anytime soon. At least not till nostalgia and immediate memory still have some clout. And they do. A whole lot if it.