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March 17, 2002
Day two of delayed blogging.

Day two of delayed blogging. I am still able to blog. There is still enough time and enough energy to blog for a day or two. No links in these blogs, just pure quick text. For those who are just tuning in. I am not at my computer. The messages here are delayed posts. I will be back next week. I am trying to write as much as I can, so you have something to read in my absence and hopefully come back.
About promises and expectations. It happens again and again. The expectations are grand, and then the actual results might not even happen at all. A person of words and no deeds is like a garden full of weeds.
I remember when my parents and I went on our great journey to Bulgaria in 1978. The trip went through the Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, of course, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and back. Yes, it was Soviet Union and not the Ukraine back then and yes, it was Czechoslovakia and not The Czech republic. The trip was an amazing adventure. About as adventurous as they should probably get for an 8 year old boy, but the reason why I am even mentioning this trip here, are the grand expectations I had for keeping track of the events. I had my pens with me and a special book and I was ready. I was ready for a serious documentation of the events to come. Just crossing the border to the Soviet Union could probably fill pages of a journal. Romania was a country so foreign, so different. I was ready for all these large events. I was not ready for their actual appearance and I was not ready for the lack of space in the back of our car. Next to me was this little boy who barely spoke, and I was always trapped in a place where I just could not write. And the events were more exciting than I would have been able to describe anyway. About that time I also wanted to write like Henryk Sienkiewicz (look him up, I am not putting any links here..., he is the one who wrote Quo Vadis and got a Nobel Prize in Literature for it.) I was in love with NEL (look her up.) and I was sure that I could write another W Pustyni I w Puszczy. His book had 500 pages, maybe... Mine was out of ideas on page 3. I just did not know how to describe anything. Things were just happening. I traveled. I walked, I saw. (Oh, it was me, me, me and the others)... But I did not really travel or do or see... It was all a bit too much. The trip to eastern Europe will need some entries. It was a really good trip for me. It was also the trip that made the other trip possible, that eventually led to me being able to write this very blog.

Comments

A good place to start looking for NEL would be on the Nobel Prize site perhaps? : )
Here is Henryk Sienkiewicz' page.
(Which would have allowed us to find the English title of a book... and then also a movie... with the same title as the book... (The book and movie are called In Desert and Wilderness.)
I just realized that there is a new version of the movie with new actors... but I must say that the new Nel, played by Karolina Sawka pretty much exactly portrays the look of my ideal girl when I was 8... hmm... how strange... the role of the ideal girl of my childhood recast, so perfectly...

Posted by: Witold Riedel on August 5, 2003 04:34 AM

As for this particular "novel" ending... I hope it will not actually end too soon...
Life is often best experienced from a safe distance of a few years, so what appears to be the "present" is actually also a series of pointers to myself which will then allow me to revisit the currently officially invisible parts of my life. And so hopefully, if I manage to be alive ten years from now, it will be possible to reread some of the current material and to fill in the blanks I would not dare to fill in now, as it would be like trying to count the bolts on a quickly turning wheel...
And even then, the descriptions will probably be just an additional layer of pointers to myself...
The larger the distance, the safer it will be to write without causing any injuries to others and myself...
And so, hopefully, this place will turn into something very different than a novel and certainly something slightly different than a finite dimensions of a printed book...
Hmm...
If only I will be able to add layers...
and I am also certainly going to repeat myself sometimes... and show very contradictory angles of the same story...
hmm...
All will be good... or so I hope... this here is (knock on wood) still very much a living site, by somebody who is relatively alive... every day...

Posted by: Witold Riedel on August 5, 2003 04:56 AM

It is also quite possible that some of the pages here will need to go or be edited, altered, corrected...

Gosh, this should all not sound as self centered as it does...
hmm...

Posted by: Witold Riedel on August 5, 2003 05:30 AM
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