Stay This Day and Night With Me by Belén Gopegui

Author:Belén Gopegui
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

Part two

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Given that my work consists of reporting on applications rather than stories, I’m not sure what value to assign to this division of the text in two parts. It may simply resemble the intermission in plays or the half-time in sports competitions, a pause that gives people time to go out and smoke a cigarette. Though I don’t smoke, I could take advantage of this lowering of the curtain to discuss a certain matter with all of you. In my context, pausing a program helps one to better understand its behavior.

On the other hand, no one really understands the nature of introspection. That is to say, nearly everyone accepts that we can contemplate our own states of mind. But contemplating them is not the same as seeing them. When people talk about introspection, they tend to imagine this: someone spending time watching what’s going on inside their head, or their spirit, or what people call the heart. But no; watching—what we call watching—is impossible, because watching, for the time being, means there is someone who’s watching and someone or something being watched. One can certainly think while in one state of mind about another; that’s different from watching oneself think.

You’ll say that this distinction isn’t especially significant. Granted. Still, I see it as important with respect to these lines. I’d really like to be able to see myself reading the text I’ve transcribed. I’d like to be able to see how this text operates inside me, the neural networks it passes through, which networks it pauses in, which it strengthens and which it weakens. Since I’m unable to do this, what I can do is to take a pause myself now and then and ask myself why I’ve chosen the company of Mateo and Olga. I must be gaining experience from their story and processing it to deal with future situations. But I think that, above all, it’s that I’m spending time with them, though this wasn’t my assigned task. You may recall that no human being exists in the abstract: time moves through them, as does space; they always occupy a particular position. With that in mind, I read somewhere that a human is a biological machine that turns energy into sadness. And I think: perhaps it’s the other way around. Resume where you left off. Time marches on without intention, without fear.

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