The longing for what you already know is the strongest

Is it flying shame why I just stay here the summer? It might be weird if you still don’t have it, but it’s also weird that that has to be the shame that bothers you now. You can still be ashamed. Everything we do, from watching Netflix to eating yogurt, puts a strain on the planet.

We are just the tax ourselves. But we point to the cows with their methane farts and lecture each other. There is so little progress in the measures that I sometimes find myself ridiculous with my separated waste and my ‘flying shame’ – if I have any.

I can’t believe we’re going to stop the disaster. The answer cannot be that you should not worry about anything, because then you have already given up. Anyway, haven’t flown in years. So I didn’t go to Greece.

A neighbor recently said defiantly: “Why do I have to go somewhere else? Tell me what to do there?” “We aren’t going anywhere either,” I heard myself declare diligently, “it’s lovely here!” And it is, usually. But that stupid virtuous face I pulled while presenting myself as a very contented human being, just as it should be, hm.

In the corona time, everyone suddenly knew to quote Pascal, that the biggest trouble comes from people not being able to just sit quietly in a chair. It was usually written with an air of ‘I can sit quietly in a chair’.

I find it boring to sit quietly on a chair every day, I want to walk through the market, go to a museum, walk somewhere and eat a croquette. And I miss Greece.

What am I looking for there then? It’s nice here too, isn’t it?

But the smell of the marble sidewalks in Athens or the sound of the sea between rocks. The silence of noon on an island quay; dive into the cool underwater world from a rock; eating fried fish by the sea.

What is it that makes it so difficult for the senses to be satisfied with the memory and want to experience everything again and again?

Recently I was trying to think of where I would go if I really wanted to go somewhere I had never been. Of course you can come up with something: finally visit the pyramids and the royal tombs of Egypt, or New York. But actually those aren’t deep desires, precisely because I’ve never been there.

What you want is to have the same experience as the one you remember and at the same time the sensation should be like new. What I long for is similar to the kind of things home is all about: the smell of the morning when you step outside, the sound sandals make on the paving stones, sunlight through the room window. It’s not that the experience is stored in a particular place, it’s that it can only happen to you there. But do I really desire, when I walk here in the speckled shade of trees or smell the jasmine, that it should be the shade and the fragrance in Greece? No, not that. So I say to myself: it is better not to reminisce too much, then they can just turn into desires.

Outside, the garden is shimmering in the sun. Oh, the sensation of a glass with sparkling drops on the outside – it’s attainable.