This week, I traveled with my family for Winter Break. As the inevitable doesn't necessarily mean that we're prepared for it, the trip was over and the last day was greeted with hopes of freezing it. My brother and my father, disciples of the Dead Poet Society, decided that every second would be eternal if we made it count. That's absolutely true, but I'm not sure if I agree with their definition of "making it count". They woke up disapprovingly early and set their minds to do everything they hadn't had time to do yet, leaving the room in a nervous frenzy, as if the unceasing tick of the clock was playing in their heads. The problem is, Time won't slow down by the number of activities we can compress in it, but by how focused we're in each of them. And, more importantly, why do we need to put a final checkmark on anything anyways? We didn't visit every place we had planned to, and I'm perfectly fine with it.
A figure that hasn't quite left my mind today is Penelope, Ulysses' wife. She tricked her suitors saying that she would only marry one of them once she had finished a burial shroud for her father-in-law, but every night she undid the work she had done during the day. The context is unusual, but if set aside, the question arises: what's the goal, the finished work or the working on it? The same theme is mentioned by Eça de Queiroz, in The Maias:
Maria Eduarda: And why should it [an embroidery] end? The pleasure is in working on it, don't you think? One stitch today, another stitch tomorrow, it turns thus into a company... why would you want to come to the end of things?
Carlos Eduardo: It's not like this. Some things only exist when they're completed, and only then allow the joy once searched on them.
Obs: that's a lousy translation made by me, for pragmatic purposes. I'm sorry for this butchery of the Portuguese language.
Right now, I'm more inclined to agree with Maria Eduarda. I even wonder whether anything can ever be completed; after all, the word perfect comes nowhere else but from the Latin verb perfectus, which means to finish, and we all know perfection is an illusion... This way, I can't help but find it useless to rush a job instead of enjoying it's process, just like my father and brother seemed to be doing this morning. There's no knowing of a place, no mastery of a subject, there isn't even the completion of an embroidery or that of a shroud. To believe a perfect estate will be achieved is to misunderstand the purpose of your actions, for then you'll never experience any pleasure at all, and if you can actually finish what you started, what will you do then? Nowadays we marathon series and read books overnight, in such an urge to know what will happen that we don't realize the best moment is the present, when there's still a long way to go. I can only speak for myself, but the satisfaction of knowing has never been able to match the thrill of the mysterious, for before something is finished it can still be everything else.
Life, though, forces us to checkmark somethings, even if they're unavoidably imperfect. Were Time eternal, maybe our works would eventually reach an end, but because it's running sand we have to settle at some point and place the dot. Whenever we talk about finishing, it merely means stopping. And maybe the reason why I was so displeased with my father and brother today was because, if they decided that they had come to know the entire place, there would be no reason to come back. Not to place the dot is a luxury, for it's to trust that both Life and Time will allow you to keep returning to it, when in truth you might just die the following day and have done less than you could have. But such thinking only makes each step faster and less enjoyable, and so I leave the ties unknotted, which in the end might be our only choice...
