by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 AFRICA Staff Writer

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QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA -

"All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song." -- Pablo Neruda

I'm older than my girlfriend by seven years. The real difference though between us is not years but experience. I understand how much of a strain it must be for her natural communicativeness to live with a person like me, moody and bottled up in his thoughts most of the time. Unfortunately other people see it too, and have recently decided to scavenge on our problems, to give her the attention she lacks from me.

They wound me where they know it hurts. To rob a knight of his lady is to rob him of the eyes that see for him and the sun that lights him. A knight without a lady is like a tree without leaves, a shadow without the body that casts it.*

My girlfriend is at the marriageable age when desire for companionship has graduated to a need for stability. On the other hand I'm still disenfranchised about things, bored with worldliness and, like Jean Genet, feel 'I can only be truthful when I'm completely alone.' I'm told it is natural for men of my age (34) to suddenly acutely notice the cloying flaws of unoriginality in the world and be anxiously bordered by them. They even have a term of convenience for it, 'midlife crisis'. Unfortunately, knowing that does not help me much because my girlfriend and I are drifting apart.

I'm amazed at your lack of feeling. You must be made of marble or solid bronze, you have no emotions in you. I keep watch while you snore, and lament while you rejoice, and faint from fasting while you get lazy and out of breath from gluttony. Get up, for God's sake!*

If I didn't love her, or was still keen on taking the easy way out, my choices would be simpler. But I feel we have enough similarities to share a life together, and enough difference to stimulate that life, even though we still lack understanding. Hostile trivialities block access to our love. No one stirs me, or reaches so deep in my life that I feel impaired without, like her. I know I'll never be able to live with anyone but her just as much as I know I'll never be able to live with her in total peace.

	writelikegod.com
	When is the last time you talked politics with your dog' dogshatebush.com

I'm too aware of my self, my infuriating self-containment, my spontaneous rudeness, my insulting silences, my tendency towards reclusiveness, my sad soul, my sensitiveness to artificiality and superficiality, my detesting the rim world of false expectations, my loathing for greed and selfishness; my weariness with secondhand, untested opinions; my love of virginity in senses; my inconsistencies and lies; my ambiguities from a feeble, possibly unique self in search of real experience and; my often too distant self with i ncurable isolation.

She [my girlfriend] too knows all that because she uses some of them as her weapons of defense whenever I suggest her own imperfections. Under themes of our blissfulness she senses a somber note of doom that scares her. We recently hired a DVD movie, 'The Hours'; the one Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for last year for playing the life of VW (Virginia Woolf). There was an instant when VW was about to commit suicide. As VW walks to the river to drown herself she says: 'To have looked at life and loved it for what it is, and then put it aside, forever . . .'

I liked the sentence because it explained VW's suicide as non-cowardly and pre-meditated decision. I never got to explain that to my girlfriend because she concentrated only on the petal of doom that scared her in my admiration. To me VW faced with courage the fact that when it comes to the crunch each of us is alone. As the result, the destruction of her own life seemed almost creative. My only criticism was how does a mere mortal know enough about life to have enough confidence to deny it? In our human capacities there's always something elusive about life, what's called mystery. It sounds like blind pride to reject life only because it does not meet our intellectual standards. The true greatness of a Don Quixote is the triumph of the burden of optimism over the gnaws of discontent and the ability to be born from the wreckage like a phoenix rising from the ahses.

A knight I am and a knight I shall die, God willing. Some men take the easy road of ambition, others that of obsequiousness and hypocrisy, and a few choose the way of true religion. But I follow my star along the narrow road of knighthood. . .*

There's has to be something of which all of us can share, of immeasurable greatness and creative faithfulness we feel in our souls. The likes of Don Quixote, clamouring for simple truths among entangling illusions, were foolish enough to hanker after it and paid the price with their sanity. They whittled down to a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything. . .(T.S. Elliot)

"When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crown of stars. (W. B. Yeats)

En los nidos de antano no hay pajaros hogano (In last year's nests there are no birds this year).

*

* Don Quixote by Cervantes