You move from contract to contract, with little job security and no time to root yourself in the place you live. There is a pleasantness to it: you live the life of a writer, you are unknown, yet to prove yourself, but the channels are open to you – there is a chance. And there is a pleasantness in momentum – there is no time for anxiety; you laugh at those who are anxious, just as you laugh when others tell you of difficulties with their house, their wife, their job (what time have you for these things?). Perhaps you live the life of a beautiful soul: weightless, ephemeral, you barely leave an imprint on the world; no one knows you. You find yourself living here and then there, it doesn’t matter. And you pare your living expenses down until it is as if you can survive on air. Air and books.
The everyday: to you, it was that time when, after a hardworking morning, you could take a stroll around the town. The time before a hardworking evening and a busy night. It is a time of pure potential, when you enjoy the feeling of the indeterminability of the future. Who are you? The future asks you this question. And your reply: I haven’t, yet, begun to live. – You live within that alibi.
What, then, when you have to begin? You find yourself living in one place or another (it could be anywhere) and know you will be there for some time. Until then, you had rather enjoyed living like a ghost. Now you are known, and you harden under the gaze of the others, you coalesce out of the air, out of the afternoon; you are no longer lost in the drift of the everyday. Who are you: the question can be answered. I am —-; I work as —-.
Lars Iyer's Blog 