a better place

 On the couch with an ancient copy of To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. The copy was given to me by a gentleman I met in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2010 when I was visiting from England to see friends. He gave it to me the day before my birthday sixteen years ago, 7 September 2010, and he wrote a note on the inner sleeve, ‘To my friend across the pond.’ I cherish it. I say ‘ancient’, but this copy was printed in 1966, the same year that England last won the World Cup. 

Literature is the archaeology of human suffering. We can excavate the traces of this suffering from within the pages of global works throughout millennia of literature. From cruelty, enslavement, war, racism, infidelity, ennui, family relationships, it is all there to see. The keys to happy living could be mapped out from these findings and yet we tend to repeat the same mistakes in endless cycles because we struggle to break away from tradition and ‘how it has always been.’ One of the saddest things in literature are the characters that are simply background… the people running around in an eighty year old Chinese novel making tea and dinner, or doing the cleaning, for the protagonists in a novel who are ‘suffering’ from the end of a relationship or a fleeting lost romance. We usually don’t learn anything about the lives of those ‘servants.’ How many people, over hundreds of years, were born and suffered through meaningless and unrecognised lives, suffering until death finally set them free? How many people, today, sit in cars or on trains for hours to get to an office where they sit for many more hours in fear and anxiety, being told what to do, to then do the same commute again to go home and cook and clean and sleep in order to repeat it all again the following day? 

Let’s use the past to learn from our mistakes and try to make the world a better place. 


Today we ate momo...



MoMo2Go, Irving, Texas. 

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