The Wednesday before I left Maryland, Seth and I had one of those long, synthesizing/rehashing conversations on the hood of my car. It was a warm, quiet night, and we had just meanderingly come home from seeing Garden State, walking past sprinklers and pausing on the steps of Chevy Chase ES to discuss our mutual discomfort with the movie's emotional affect. We discussed Modernism vs. Postmodernism - all the self-referentiality nowadays, the cataclysmal self-consciousness that reduces human experience to cliches. I suppose we felt reduced by our reactions to Garden State. And I said that we couldn't be paralyzed or ashamed that everything has been said and done before - Woolf, et al., write every moment as absolutely new, overspilling cliche.
I would like to say more about my last days in town with Seth, particularly our very nice last day together, but there really isn't anything. I think I feel done with this blog, and with all of the conjuring of the past I've tried to do. Something is fundamentally different now, and it's not just that Seth and I are pretty conclusively apart; it's some sort of private paradigm shift (to keep with the Postmodern buzz-words). I'm no longer so concerned with monitoring my own life. I'm no longer disproportionately or remarkably happy or unhappy; I'm living instead of Alive, and I feel passively abstracted and content. So far this year, I've read (everything I've been assigned!) Rousseau and Kant, Fowles and J.G. Ballard and Calvino, Saussure and Freud and Lacan. I've copy-edited for six hours straight, five times a week. I've stayed up for hours gossiping with Jess Mo., been picked up, and gone on a date.
It's not that I'm particularly full of potential, or that my surroundings are so rich; it's that it feels better not to notice. This is the fruition I wanted - the construction of my life as a self-perpetuating system, so I can sit back and absorb and enjoy. Concerning Seth, of course I still care about him, and I'm glad that we're still so close. As for this blog, I'm not up for it anymore - but I'll let you know if I change my mind.