Uh, so this post took on a life of its own. It's huge, much longer than I ever intended, and more than a little scattered. But, shit, it took me three hours to write, so I'm not going to let that go to waste. As with everything on Mr. Wright, I suppose, here it is, take it or leave it.

The infinite spaces of a life

I don't often drink alone, but a few minutes ago I grabbed a Paulaner Oktoberfest Marzen out of the fridge because I wondered if the brew was as good as I remembered. I was reading something on the computer when I took my first sip, and the beer was as rich and smooth as I thought. The flavor unexpectedly shook loose a vivid memory: sitting on the beach by Lake Belton in the middle of the night with Lilly shortly after I'd moved to Temple.

I had almost forgotten about that, although it's hard for me to imagine anything more pleasant than that evening as we sat in the sand talking about nothing in particlar and looking out over a silvery, silent lake. At the time this apartment was only a task waiting to be accomplished. For Lilly, the semester ahead — and freedom from the Telegram — seemed like it would never come.

But here I was today, devoting all my efforts toward making this little square of mine feel like home, pausing only briefly to chat with her on the phone about the current crises down in the Texan basement....

What I'm having trouble describing is the sensation of being in one place (my apartment) and then suddenly being somewhere else (the beach). With that sip of beer, it felt almost like tunnel vision, like zoning out and suddently existing in a time and a place where things are different from the world I encounter every day. Everything, from the physical spaces I inhabit to how I view and interact with the people and places around me. The situations that mattered to me, the concerns and dilemmas and hopes and joys of that day, which were different from the next day's, and are different from today's — all of that came flashing back.

Strangest of all is the realization of boundaries in my life. They are, for the most part, conceptual — all in my head. Today I spent the entire day in my personal space, with it's white walls and blue carpet and rectangle door and square bookshelves and the smooth circle on the lip of the beer bottle. I spent the whole day trying to make it liveable. I cleaned up, I made Frito pie, I paid the bills, I began to hang some art. It is a world all my own, with only the buzz of the refrigerator for company.

So when that sip of beer snapped me to another place — one much less rigidly defined (with no apartment and no idea what would happen to me in the weeks to come) — and then snapped me right back again, I suddently became more aware of how small the here and now really is.

I thought of all the spaces I inhabit. My apartment; my job; Temple; weekends in Austin; my parents' home; my old neighborhood in San Antonio; this blog; all the blogs I read by strangers in New York and Washington and California; books (still more distant lives that I make part of my own); my memories; my goals; the unknown future; this state; this country; the inordinate amount of time I spend thinking of what might have been; all the different lives of all my friends in all the different social circles; the never-ending coversation I have with myself in my head all day.

Where is my place in all of this? I don't mean, How do I give my life meaning? or, How do I find a purpose? I mean, How do I figure out how to spread the thin resource of time among so many competing interests?

Where is the balance between what I have to do, both in order to make a living and as a responsible inhabitant of the world, and what I do to make life worth living? Do I owe the world a thing? Or is the life that gives nothing to the future just a waste?

Everything I read today kept pushing these questions to the front of my mind. I noted some of it in the post below. I was also reminded by Matthew Yglesias that three years agothat day was dominated by fear more than any other emotion:

It was a day, we heard, that demonstrated the best in America. And in many ways it was. But 9-11 as a great triumph of the human spirit isn't the 9-11 I recall on the ground. I remember it as a terrifying, horrible, confusing day followed by several terrifying, horrible, confusing weeks.

But he is the exception, as he points out later in that post. For most of us that day was a horrible spectacle. It didn't change our actual lives one bit.

So what was the appropriate response? Should we even respond to something that, if TVs and and newspapers didn't exist, would not have made a ripple in our lives?

I'm tempted to say, Of course, but that seems too simple.

How can I explain this?

As I sit here tonight, it is both terrifying and depressing to read, "In August, according to a human rights monitoring group, Israel killed 42 Palestinians, including fighters. In the same period, according to the World Health Organization, more than 10,000 people died in Darfur..." Or to read that North Korea, more than likely, just tested a nuclear bomb. But what can you do? What should you do?

I suppose it is something to acknowledge that you are at the bottom of this great superstructure, which you help shape as it vaguely controls you. But a feeling of impotence washes over even the election that I will directly particpate in. Shortly before Labor Day, just before this typewriter controversy started, I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what was going on in this election. I was going to solve the problem of the SwiftVets and the National Guard and why people paid so much attention to this bullshit. I had a long discussion with Kriston about it on AIM; I scribbled out lengthy free-writing pieces on the subject; I considered starting another blog dedicated solely to politics. Then came the weekend. I went down to Austin, hung out with my friends, drank a lot, and had a blast.

When I got back to the news, the election was rolling on, as retarded as ever, with a new controversy popping off all across the blogosphere. It was enough to make me say, "Fuck it. I'm out." I'd vote in November, straight Democratic because that party was a lot closer to my ideals than the other one, no matter how soulless or flat or full of shit its candidates were.

But then, just tonight, while I joked with friends online and ate a bowl of Crispy Rice, I read about genocide and nuclear bombs on the other side of the world. I felt a strange tinge of responsibility for those attrocities. If only I, and enough people of a like mind, had kept on top of things and kept other people better informed, maybe the political climate that exists today that allowed these tragedies would not be.

Is that really the case, though? I guess that is the central question I'm considering tonight: To what extent should we react to change that doesn't effect us, but affects people within the spaces of our lives?

Did the world change on September 11? It did. For many people in ways that are unimaginable. For the world as a whole, in ways that are unpredictable. But for most of us it was just a big story, one fraught with horror and disgust and empathy and not a small amount of fear for our own lives.

But today, the fact remains that my day-to-day life has not changed one bit because of the attacks.

How am I to react? I believe, as both Juan Cole's and Yglesias' posts show, to ignore the situation would be an invitation to make it worse. But at the same time what is actually important to me, what has a direct effect on my life, are unimportant trivialities: what I had for dinner, what I do for a living, if that girl smiled at me, whether my photos on this roll of film came out.

From this point, I don't know where to go. I've been thinking about things like this a lot lately, big-picture sorts of things. And I never come to any conclusions. Take one example.

Just the other day, I was interviewing a recruiter for the U.S. Army, and he was talking about the reasons people join. We both expressed our admiration for those people who join only out of an insatiable sense of duty to country. That commitment seemed virtuous in its mere existence.

But I don't know anymore. Reading today, I began to wonder if patriotism is always harmful, and not only when abused by tyrants. I started to think that maybe love of country was just another boundary we all impose on ourselves, just as people constrain themselves to an ethnicity or as fanatics allow a cause to become their identity.

It seems to me that patriotism at its root is kin to the human sentiment that leads to all human conflict. It is more than an identification with a specific space; it is the desire to affect change in another space that would otherwise not affect you at all. Or, to rephrase, it is the compulsion to react to changes in distant spaces which, again, would otherwise never touch you. Couple this sentiment with the competition for scarce resources, and you've got war.

It seems to me that it is the same strain of human nature that allows a terrorist to rationalize attacking a banker in New York because he does not like the way one group of people in the Middle East, the Israelis, treats another group of people in the Middle East, the Palestinians (see Cole's piece linked below) — it is the same strain that makes it seem logical to attack one country because of the actions of a few guys in caves in a totally different country. That one attack was carried out in dispicable means and another under a banner of freedom, in either case, death is the result. The intent in no way softens the outcome to the victims. This is not to say I'm a pacifist, but that I have this strange distrust of any endeavor undertaken with a strong dose of patriotism, and I don't think the actions post-9/11, and more specifically, in Iraq, could be characterized any other way. I just don't see why it should be necessary when spelling out the case for war or anything else. Maybe in an ideal world, it wouldn't be.

But that is only one example. The larger questions that I posed tonight remain unanswered and probably always will. It is no more of a mystery to me why I even undertook to discuss them. It really did start with that sip of beer. Perhaps that is telling. Then again, I have no idea what compels me to write in this space, or why I take so many photographs. It is something I do, I guess, in order to try to understand the bigger forces guiding my life, guiding everyone's lives. But more and more I'm thinking it is impossible to really understand the small things right in front of you — and those only if you're lucky.

For the past month now I have spent my days telling stories about an insignficant town that, to most people, means nothing more than an exit sign off I-35. I spend every day telling these little stories and coming home to read about the big ones, and I'm still not entirely sure which are truly important.