I Went To Europe
and i can't remember a single thing!
Somehow I have once again managed to write something that is mostly just about how I didn’t know how to write about something. Again, not sure if any of it makes sense. Good stuff!
The concept of “living in the moment” doesn’t make much sense to me. Or I guess I’m just not very good at it. Its commonly accepted meaning – enjoy what you have in the present, don’t worry about the future – makes perfect sense to me, and is generally something I’d like to think I adhere to. But I’m not sure if that’s what living in the moment really means.
When I find myself living in a particularly important moment, I’m never so much preoccupied with the future as I am overly preoccupied with the present. Sometimes it’s like a moment is so big, there’s no way I could possibly be living in all of it fully – something has to be left out. Whether it’s too many emotions or too many thoughts or too many senses, there’s a too-much-ness to the present that my brain can’t metabolize. And this wouldn’t be a problem if I wasn’t also aware of the existence of these missing, unreachable bits, and of the fact that, subsequently, my memory of said important moment will always be incomplete, like a bad AI rendering of the real moment or a free-hand drawing of something that really would’ve looked better if you’d just traced it.
In a way, I guess my preoccupation with the present is sort of a simultaneous preoccupation with the future, and an uneasiness about the past. I can’t “live in the moment” because I know soon it’ll be over, and I’ll only be able to access the knock-off version of it in my head, never the real thing again. (This isn’t a novel thought, I think this is like, one of those big unsolvable problems of being a human that lots of people write songs and stories about.)
On my Recent Mega Life-Changing Trip To Europe, I kept thinking how nice it’d be if something in our brains could record the totality of an important moment, even the parts our consciousness couldn’t fit as we lived it. Then, whenever we wanted, we could dig back through something like a mental filing cabinet and see the whole moment in its completion, including all of the thoughts or bites or smells that had somehow escaped our memory. If our brains could do this, maybe I’d be less fixated on the impermanence of the present. I’d really “live” in the moment, assured that anything I’ve missed would be preserved in a future trip back into the past! But alas.
Once, in Lisbon, I tried to journal about everything I’d seen and ate and thought so far, but I ended up just staring at a blank page for a while, realizing I had no idea what to say or where to start. It was the too-much-ness problem. I knew I had lived all of the things I was trying to write about, but when I went to put those memories back together in words, it felt like looking for a sock in a pile of laundry dumped over the floor. I know it’s there, it’s just really hard to find. And I sort of forget what it looks like.
Hours after I started writing this, I was in bed scrolling through my photo album of words I like, and I came across something I’d read earlier this summer in Rachel Cusk’s novel Second Place. I had completely forgotten about it, but it’s exactly how I feel!
“Some of the most interesting writers could pass as bank managers, I said, while the wittiest raconteur could become dull once he had recognised the necessity of explaining his anecdotes piece by piece. Some people write simply because they don't know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.
Because I’m annoying — although I do believe a lot of us live our lives like we’re characters in a story and that this is generally fun and typically harmless — I had thought about what I would write after this trip before I actually experienced any of it. Whenever something mildly interesting happens to me, I have the thought “oh I should write about this!” (I usually never end up writing about it) and this trip was going to be probably The Most Interesting Thing To Ever Happen To Me, so I imagined taking down all of these really profound observations and anecdotes and everything else one wants to talk about after they’ve seen something cool for the first time. In retrospect, a lot of the pressure I placed on the important moments and my anxiety about the Fleeting Nature Of It All was, at least in part, rooted in this self-imposed requirement to memorialize it in some dumb, overly indulgent Eat Pray Love essay for a glorified Finsta Substack.
And now look at me! I have neither the memories nor the Eat Pray Love essay to show for it.
Obviously it wasn’t like I was blacked out for the whole trip — I remember things — but whenever someone asks to “hear ALL about it!” or “tell me everything!” it’s the lost sock problem again. I don’t know where to start reconstructing the hours or the meals or the thoughts. If I sat down now, weeks after the trip, and tried to write down everything that happened day by day, I could probably do it, but it’d be perforated with little holes where all of the details that I’ve forgotten should be. It’d be flawed and hazy and imperfect. If the present is recorded in 4K, my retelling would be shitty, flip-phone camera resolution, at best.
I suppose it’s unrealistic to expect that memories could ever contain the entirety of a moment, or that just writing about those moments could ever restore them to the completeness that is living them in real time. A potential solution to all of this could be to not prematurely work moments up in my head so much to the point that reality somehow pales in comparison, or to release this assumption that Important Moments need to be written about in order to stay important.
But where is the fun in that!