Things I’ve Lost

I’ve lost the feeling of knowing exactly exactly how it feels to stand by a horse, and gently clap his mule, and know that the horse used to be magical, and was on numerous adventures with you, and was your true friend. And now you’re back home, and he’s just a horse, a good and a smart one as horses go, but he barely knows you anymore, well, he does, in the usual, horsey way, but you know, you know, and you remember, and you make a silent promise to him you will remember for both of you.

I think I was six or so, my memories are clearly divided between the memories from before the school and after I started school, and the memory of this understanding, of knowing I had it and then lost it, is firmly placed in my pre-school years. For the longest time I thought it was Dorothy, back from Oz, but I’ve seen the film recently, and there isn’t a horse there, at least not in Kansas. Perhaps it’s better not to know what film it was, the memory is too fragile and too precious to be overwritten by later impressions.

I’ve lost my dreams of whales, of diving with the whales.

In most recurring dreams, you start knowing yourself, and your dreams, over the years, and your rational self starts whispering to you: Wait, wait, this sure looks familiar, are you sure it’s not another dream? And those thoughts, that don’t belong in the dream logic, they’ll push you out, and you’ll inevitably surface out of the dream, back into the awake rationality. It has never been like that with the dreams of whales, every dream meeting with them was the first one, the feeling of utter terror, that one of them would unintentionally swat me with a gigantic fin or a tail, and break my back, or kill me, mixed with an all-encompassing joy of, well, of swimming with whales: Glimpses of understanding between us, their intelligence different, alien, still unmistakably there.

I started dreaming of whales when I was eleven or twelve, at the scary time of slowly starting to become a grown-up. Perhaps losing those dreams means that the unsettling process is finally over, that I’ve learned how to be one. I don’t like that thought, I miss the whales.

I’ve lost the understanding of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

We had been dabbling at it for a while, Saul Kripke was coming to give a lecture at our university, and it was to be on The Incompleteness Theorem. And I felt for days, that I was on verge of it, and then one afternoon, standing with Rolf G in front of the blackboard, gesticulating, discussing loudly, and probably disturbing everyone else who had come there to do some actual work, I got it. I understood it, it made perfect sense. I quickly left, I wouldn’t talk more about it, I never had a good head for mathematics and I was afraid I’d lose it, and Kripke’s lecture was just hours away.

I did keep it, the understanding, for long enough, I went to the lecture, and it was one of the greatest intellectual joys of my life: I still remember parts of it quite well, and can retell the opening joke, about him, Kripke, a philosopher that against all odds of the occupation, came into some money and decided to invest into a reinsurance company, but one that insures all the reinsurance companies that don’t insure themselves, and insures only the reinsurance companies that don’t insure themselves. That was an homage to Bertrand Russel’s barber paradox, it’s twenty years ago, and I didn’t have to look it up to write this. But the understanding of Gödel’s Theorem, I’ve lost it completely, I know it’s a theorem, and it’s made by someone called Gödel, and I don’t have a single idea what it is about. But the opening of Kripke’s lecture I have left, and the memory of the moment I understood the theorem, and that’s a memory I like to touch sometimes, it colours that part of my life, of being young and studying philosophy and language and logic, as much as the memory of the not-longer-magical horse colours my last pre-school year.

I’ve lost the absolutes. I’ve lost all my always and most of my nevers and I also don’t get angry, really angry, anymore.

I don’t miss them much, I’m starting to enjoy the existence between always and nevers, further away from them then I was before. I like the softer transitions, the blurry lines, which come with age, or wisdom. I do however miss getting angry, really angry, I miss being furious.

I’ve recently lost a fragile feeling of something, more than friendship, less than love. I’ve had it for a long time, it was rare and precious to me.

I’ve lost it suddenly, on a fine summer evening, because of something my friends, our friends, said, not in anger, not maliciously, just a small detail I wasn’t aware of, but those words collapsed the quantum waves, the Schrodinger’s cat seized being both dead and alive, Inception lasted for five more seconds, and we saw the top fall, or we saw it spinning indefinitely, it doesn’t matter, both endings are equally bad, and Dorothy, she woke up from being knocked out during a tornado, knowing for sure, without a shred of doubt, that there never was The Wonderful Land of Oz.

These are the things I have lost over time. I revisit them sometimes, they are just fleeting moments, shimmering, unsubstantial memories, still, they are my touchstones, a thin line connecting me to who I was then, to who I am now.

Maybe this last loss, maybe it will go from a sorrow of losing the feeling to the memory of the exact moment I lost it, sitting on the lush green grass, with good friends, in the bright sun of a Nordic summer afternoon. Maybe it will in time become one of them, another touchstone, and I’ll remember exactly how it felt to be me, at this time of my life.

But not now, not yet. After a while, I might come to see the sepia tones of Kansas, a Kansas without Oz, as warm and beautiful, but right now, sepia is just blue.