all during the meal

i finally have the time to start writing, hacking away, squinting, tyring to come up with something palatable. the first step is to transcribe the journal i made some five months ago. the writing is awkward, but i see myself of the past struggling to take on some form. i stumbled upon someone's phd dissertation in theology, about the equivalent or perhaps superior importance of the reader's understanding of the text to the author's supposed "meaning" he put this as one of those quotes at the header of the chapter (someone tell me the name of those):

The professor is there at his desk; in the cone of light from a desk lamp his hands surface, suspended, or barely resting on the closed volume, as if in a sad caress. "Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, pas, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead..."
-Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
the dissertation is called "trembling on the verge of allegory" if you want to google it.

an excerpt from the journal:
"Whenever I have to leave I get this sort of gripping solitude and I don't say anything to anyone and I don't think of anything except how the world is dark, like the condemned man in Li Zhenshi's book, and the life of the drunken poet. Everyone looks like they miss me already, so I know I'm condemned. All I can do is go out with dignity. I don't say anything because I'm already gone to them. I saw this same look on Chris' face as we were gathering our bags in the hotel In Shanghai. She had the look of someone who knows their fate, curses the cruelness of the world, but understands that crying about it only makes you lose face (mian zi). I tried to explain the concept to Bernardo and Mimi, but how can I explain in Spanish if I don't know the word in English. If choosing is renouncing then leaving is arriving. Travelling by land insulates you from this schizophrenic shock. You have some time to forget what you have given up and prepare yourself for what you have chosen. Maybe the road brings me my mental health, or maybe I have chosen and renounced, left and arrived enough that the road is the only place I am not haunted by the cruelness of modernity. Wherever I am, I am faced by a desperation of knowing that I will one day leave that place forever or leave every other place forever by not doing the former. I will one day reject my home or reject all other homes. The limbo is my only refuge."
sarah will be privileged to have the transcript when i finish typing it this weekend.

Li Zhenshi's book is called "Red color news soldier"