The Write Thing

I have recently seen a wonderful movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, soon to open in Buenos Aires. The script is based on a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald which you can actually access online.

The story essentially poses the question of aging backwards. The protagonist, Benjamin Button, looks like an 80-year-old in a baby’s body when he first sees the light of day, and then grows young. Life happens in the meantime, and shows its complexity through it all, even with the benefit of youth instead of old age as part of progress. Who has not ever imagined what it would feel like to be a 20-year old in the mind of a 50-year old, combining experience gained with suffering with the supple structure of a vigorous body that responds to everything with a lot more energy? I know what it feels like to be 20, but I don’t know what it feels like to be 50 yet. Perhaps I can only idealize such an adventurous combination. However, after seeing the movie, I still do not think it is too different from the normal order in which we age. In other words, life’s complexity is the same no matter in what direction you grow.

As a closing statement for this post, I cannot but remember one of the key lines for me, spoken by Benjamin as he goes through the suffering of being different, or maybe simply of choosing.

You can go mad as a mad dog at the way things went; you can curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.

That is the way, Benjamin. As I write this, only a few days away from getting onto another plane leading me places, with adventure hopefully waiting for me at different ports, I can look back and smile. I am learning to let go…

So the readings went. The suggestion was to be “temperate”, like Shakespeare’s summer’s day, or like a good old Christian interpreting the Bible that nobody wrote. Temperance, that was what 2008 was about.

Edgar Allan Poe became a member of the Sons of Temperance societies in August 1849. Based on the graph above, the meaning of temperance in this case would be sobriety. How else could it be, considering that Poe was an alcoholic? Strangely enough, when the word temperance comes to mind, that meaning in English is almost lost to me. Yes, the word “sober” can also be used as “proper” or “controlled” to some extent. But is a non-alcoholic somebody “controlled” or “proper”, or is (s)he simply a dry drunk?

This brings me back to the question of temperance, and the “no-no” state in the world of alcoholics…what nobody likes to be called: dry drunk. From what I understood, a dry drunk is the person who stops drinking alcohol but remains an alcoholic in behavior and lifestyle. Technically, then, you would stop being an alcoholic when you no longer consume alcohol but…is alcohol the worst of your issues, or only a good cover-up for what you do not want to deal with? If that is the case, we are all technically alcoholics, no matter whether we drink only water, as we all have issues we do not want to face. Now, are we all dry drunks? I guess most of us are, partially, in one way or another.

With the last day of December gone only a week ago, I would officially declare my year of temperance gone. I have now become acquainted with wet and dry drunkenness, and this has opened a new question for 2009. In what way am I a dry drunk?

Good old Poe probably had a poem (nothing better than having your name embedded in the noun denoting your profession to be a master) for this, or more. I dare myself to open that technical recueil on the man that I once rescued from a dusty shelf down near Port Royal RER B station as I fight off sleep and the melancholy of my good ol’ C having flown herself off to Brisbane (even when it would have never worked between us…but what the hell?)

And he has, as poetry always does, an answer:

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow –

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.