L'Étranger

Photographer: Eytan Levi from Humans of Paris

While I was in Paris, I had the honor of meeting so many brilliant people, including Eytan, the young talent behind Humans of Paris. I was shocked to hear that he is only 16. He was very polite, and carried himself with an extremely mature aura. Age is misleading. It’s generally an inaccurate measure of someone’s emotional maturity. Eytan will be visiting New York over the summer, and together we plan to embark on a little quest to hunt down Brandon from Humans of New York.

But I won’t be writing about Paris in this entry, because something else has been bothering me. I’ve found it challenging to write lately. There are simply moments when multiple strands of thoughts race through my mind at an uncontrollable pace that not even my earthquake typing can catch up with. Even all the running I’ve been doing doesn’t help with my irritability. I’ve ran more than I have ever run before this week, but I still need to unwind. My mind feels so cluttered. This got me to thinking: is my mind ever not uncluttered? Even when I’m not extremely irritable, my thoughts diverge all over the place. Perhaps a few cognitive science and psychology books would shed a bit of light upon this matter. For now, I shall coin it “hypertangential thinking”. I can appreciate short, succinct, less tangential, Seth Godin-style prose, in fact I love it. But I really take pleasure in reading and writing lengthy, poetic, nonsensical, incoherent prose. On that note, have you read anything by Joan Didion? She loves Hemingway and ironically her sentences are some of the longest I’ve ever read. Her sentences meander a lot, and you often have to re-read the entire paragraph to understand them. Check out this kickass paragraph sentence:

In the 1986 Central Park death of Jennifer Levin, then eighteen, at the hands of Robert Chambers, then nineteen, the “story,” extrapolated more or less from thin air but left largely uncorrected, had to do not with people living wretchedly and marginally on the underside of where they wanted to be, not with the Dreiserian pursuit of “respectability” that marked the revealed details (Robert Chambers’s mother was a private-duty nurse who worked twelve-hour night shifts to enroll her son in private schools and the Knickerbocker Greys) but with “preppies,” and the familiar “too much too soon.”

Read the full entry »