Andy's Mind

I’m not a great connoisseur of Gabriel García Márquez prose, in fact, “Doce cuentos peregrinos” (“Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories“) that I’m reading now is my first real encounter with his work. And this collection of twelve short stories is also the second real book I read in Spanish. It’s not as easy to read in that language for me as Coelho, since Márquez’s language is much richer and complex. Yet, I really like it and I would like to recommend this book, as it seems to be a good introduction to Márquez.

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Today is the 100th anniversary of Albert Eintein‘s publication of the third of his four Annus Mirabilis Papers entitled On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies; the seminal work that introduced the concepts which would come to be known as Special Relativity. People discuss this on blogs and /. but what did strike me is that no one sees this like a good occasion to ask a very important question: how much further did we get in science, especially physics during those 100 years.

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When I saw her this thought came to me again. She was walking towards me, a perfect blonde with long hair flowing onto her shoulders, just a little lower than me, with well marked, round breasts visible under a white blouse and a face, as perfect as her body, symmetric, smooth. Her eyes, blue-gray, just like mine, were looking through me as though I didn’t exist, while a hardly noticeable half smile twisted her perfect lips into an expression of princely superiority and indifference to a mere mortal whose presence she had to politely endure for this brief, unpleasant moment.

Yeah, I thought again, is there a ghost in this shell? Is there, beneath that superficial pose, a mind that could withstand five minutes of real conversation? Is it really so that external beauty precludes internal depth and goodness? Or is it just my karma playing tricks on me?

While meditating recently I observed how fragile is my mind’s stability and how easily it is distracted, how little it needs to produce mountains of thoughts and images. It’s just like fireworks, a little spark ignites a myriad of flashes and booms.

I sit. I hear a sound. My mind immediately recognizes it, names it in a flash so fast I can’t grasp it yet alone prevent it – it’s a car door being slammed. Rapidly, sets of images appear, various situations in which I slammed a car door. Or seen a door slammed. Or saw it in a movie. Then the mind ticks and stops on a memory. Now the thoughts tree is almost developed, I recall a situation, a smell, a feeling. But, the breathing continues and I go back to it. The image slowly dissipates, the mind becomes clear again.

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