I manage to eat the same egg sandwich every morning and be perfectly content. But I couldn’t listen to the same Dylan, Lennon or McCartney album daily for the rest of my wicked life any more than the same Stravinsky or Shostakovich symphony.
Would a greater breakfast variation pass unheeded? Hardly. With a decent skillet (or any), I’d gladly prepare eggs in one of the many Bourgeois alternatives. But as it stands, this seasonal studio apartment contains hardly an object not essential for bare survival. And I’m not so much as indifferent to spend a farthing on extra arsenal. I can eat the same boiled eggs on sliced, buttered bread, with or without cheese, for eternity.
But against better judgement, my downloaded music selection spans inexhaustible limits. My books: quiet versatile in the French language alone, considering I’ve resorted to produce my own custom pocket bindings for some months now; not to mention that library a reach away.
To be confined to the same art product each passing day sounds awfully like the desert island hypothetical or a refrain of the 1001 nights.
Or is it the brain chemistry of our survival instincts that influences complacency? The same Soviet TV channel, the same favela window view, the same cat, ferret, wife, mistress, minstrel, slave, news syndicator, bar stool - circumstances as they are, we learn to cope, appreciate and even enjoy, however mad the prospect to an independent extraterrestrial ethnographer charting the ways of our kind.
From the dusty and cloggy memory confines I plucked one particular panorama of watching the same VHS TV-recorded film day after day over I don’t know how many weeks, with all the unchanging commercial interruptions. I guess there were a handful of such recordings. Really, a mere handful. Scarcity of selection had a lot to say in the primeval stages of personal and technological development.
Today I couldn’t read the same 1001 tale with unwavering passion. Or hear the same prodigious bard lyric, or read the same Rimbaud verse. But no qualms over the egg sandwich.
Questions, comments? Connect.