Last Saturday
evening, a friend who now resides in Adelaide informed me via a text on my mobile phone that someone I knew from the university
days passed away in Sydney that afternoon. I can still recall how the person
looked, spectacled, tanned and thin. He was one of my flatmates for three
months. Decades ago, six of us in our late teens got together and rented a big house
near Coogee Beach in Sydney. The ad stated that there were several rooms and in
reality only one of the rooms was a proper bedroom and it could barely fit in a
double bunker bed. All six of us who had just gone over to
Sydney for our matriculation moved into the house. We were mistaken to think
that rooms had meant bedrooms when there was only one bedroom and the other
rooms were basically living room and dining room.I still remember how all of us
were away from home for the first lunar new year and we had missed our respective families . After three
months we decided to part as we had trouble focusing on our studies.
Nonetheless we had fun sampling
each other’s cooking and I remember the guys seemed to be better cooks than me
and the girlfriend who had kept in contact with these housemates. More than a
year ago, I was also informed that another housemate had bitten the dust.
Though I have not caught up with either of them for decades, I feel rattled as these friends were
still some years away from qualifying for senior
travel discounts.
How often I am
reminded that life is transient,
yet I get caught up with trivialities . Life is short is not just another
cliché. Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero. Seize the day as you do not
know what tomorrow will bring.
Seize the day
enjoy the moment make full use of the moment. Not every life will leave a mark,
not all lives are extraordinary, but I would imagine that these friends will be
missed by their loved ones. Even though these friends and I have become
strangers, their deaths still affect me. I cannot help thinking whether they
had unrealized dreams. Death releases one from human sufferings. No matter what
we say about human sufferings, we still prefer living than dying and we would
like to hang on to life as long as we could.
In Kinder than Solitude, Yiyun Li wrote, “ Uncle’s death had caused,
however transient ,a ripple of melancholy in Ruyu’s heart, followed by relief.
Uncle had been one of those whose lives were saturated by unwarranted sadness,
and what could be a kinder antidote to sadness than death itself?”
Yiyun Li also wrote,
“ People
don’t vanish from one’s life ;they come back in disguise.”
Maybe it is
about closure, some people have caught up with many of their school friends or
varsity friends while some people choose to move on without a trace and leave
their school friends wondering what could have happened to them. As a rule most people will only
let you in for what they want you to know and if you think about it, do you really want or need to know about all the things that have happened to the people you know?
While the story is rather
straightforward, Li’s descriptions of the characters and their psyches are
definite and compelling. Li writes
as she describes a young girl whom Boyang is attracted to when he is old enough to be her sugar
daddy: “ What made her
different from other disillusioned souls? All young people start with untainted
dreams, but how many would retain their capacities to dream? How many could
refrain from transforming themselves into corruptors of other untainted dreams?
We are all wardens and executors biding our time; what’s taken from us, what’s
killed in us, we wait for our turn to avenge.”
Kinder than
Solitude written by Yiyun Li is a page
turner that keeps you in suspense about the irresolvable crime that has caused
three friends to become estranged and how each character is driven into
loneliness and solitude by the weightiness of their own memory and guilt about the incident in which a
friend of theirs has been poisoned. Another insightful writing about how one
cannot extricate oneself from
one’s past no matter how hard one tries. Kinder than Solitude is not just about a murder mystery. click
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