To be read in the dark, by the first light of morning.

earth’s engines murmur — / interwoven melodies / twining together

Almost one in the morning and I’m still in the city, typing, a cup of coffee by my side and the music swaying. I have eaten, drunk, danced, and still the city is busy and humming as it always is on Saturday nights. It’s the cusp of the party evening, the turning point, when people stop streaming into the bars and clubs and start returning home to their beds and lovemaking and rest. Conversation is plentiful. The traffic streams on. As a man whose lifestyle takes him through all twenty-four hours, I’ve gotten used to the way the city breathes: its shifting patterns of activity and rest, rise and fall, light and darkness, pooling and eddying across the different districts. Curious to watch the city as it lives and pulses, an animal thing. I think of the rolling book of the international forex market, whose life of abstractions — and what, after all, could more abstract than the shifting values of money? — also takes it round the clock in the ebb and flow of price; an animal thing too, with its own rhythms and breath. Beyond all we think of as society, these are the forces and powers that shape us no less than we shape them, born of us, dying with us. How fine it must be to be the architect of a city or have a place in a trading room, with the great tapestries of our interaction laid out before you, always.

mist on the highways — / the night cries of lost insects / shiver through the car

~|~

I’ve driven out to Bukit Panjang, where I used to live, to get myself some supper for memory’s sake and for the pleasures of the drive. There’s a busy day ahead, though day and night are pretty much alike to me. I sleep when I please, wake when I please, and since my body clock’s not keyed to sunlit cycles I get to enjoy both, watching the waning moon in its late rising and after that, the sunrise.

I’ve been rereading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series here at the start of the year; I first read it a long time ago now, in the 1990s, and reading it again now brings me back to those now-buried days, to the memory of sunlight past. The years rise, the years fall, like the light, like the tide. Though now and again beyond the veil of years I feel myself a much younger man: I still possess the same energy, the same hopes, the same dreams, the same passions and hates. People say that youth is a time for doing crazy things, but I am a good bit older now and I still do the same crazy things. At thirty-three I am still essentially the same man I was at twenty-three. I am wiser, more experienced, more skilled, and I see more deeply into things; but that is all. The things I liked and enjoyed and valued at twenty-three are still the things I like and enjoy and value now. I have not become a part of the “adult” world where one is measured by rank and money and possessions, and I have never understood that world. It seems strange to me that people should throw away integrity, authenticity, and meaningful work, replacing them with money, power, and property, and calling it growth. I have grown, yes, but my values have grown with me; my world is deeper, richer, but not fundamentally different. Physically too I am much unchanged, save some added lines of care and age: I am still as strong and fast as I have ever been, and perhaps even stronger now, more nimble. I have not let myself grow fat and slow and sluggish or said to myself that I couldn’t help it. Staying true to one’s values and one’s self: perhaps that is the secret of everlasting youth.