I sit in a room where silence is
kept. The windows sealed, the fire dead. I sit in room filled with so many
people, and no people at all. Here you hear the laughter of a woman swept away
by the charms of some talented liar; You hear the whispers and the music. All
together forming this sort of… sound. And it’s not loud, but it’s not quiet
either. If you don’t listen with
precision, you hear the sound of the ocean. A collection of a thousand voices
that together form a different language entirely-- How could you put a sound
into terms? I guess it’s only by experience that you can hear the sound of a
thousand people: The Language of Conversation, you could call it. And it’s so
strange, so beyond strange. The feeling of a thousand voices all speaking at
the same time, forming one common voice…
And they’re all in this room of
mine.
You smell the wandering scent of
heavy alcohol mixed with the despair of the rich wandering through and the
drying and aggressive smoke of their cigars, and a sort of underlying—literal
and metaphorical—coldness. You see the golden ceiling that could reach the
stars, as it bent in its center, forming a cupola. And in its middle came
dangling a star of our own—A chandelier with so many diamonds, that you can’t
quiet tell if their all very large diamonds, that entwine to form a bright orb,
or if they are a collection of smaller diamonds that accumulate to form this
spectacular orb. Either ways, once you look up, you can’t possibly look back
down. You wouldn’t want to, anyway.
And there were so many things, so
many incredible things in this loud and lively and dead and silent room, that I’ll
never be able to list—and as I look I see that I’ve built an empty kingdom
filled with too little many-s. But all I want is that sense. All I want is that sense
of honest laughter; the sense of
honest jokes, and people who look at you, and with the simplicity in their
look—and all it takes is a look—you sense that you could mean so much. So,
yes, if I could trade my chandeliers for a wildfire, I would. I would trade my empty
kingdom for a cottage brimful with beautiful stupidity. And only then will I be
able to look up at the sky and look
at it.
Only then will I be like them, the
ones who laugh and laugh and joke and laugh even more, with all the little care
in the world, because what they have in their grasp is a power so great, so
beautiful, so humongous, so degraded, that not even the shiniest of chandeliers
can fathom.
