One night on that trip, I was rereading some stories by Jorge Luis Borges. If you haven't heard of him, he's a dead Argentine writer. I honestly don't know any more about him except that I love him, and he knows how to drive me crazy. And that he was blind. I'm pretty sure that he was blind.
Anyways...
In this story, the characters are at a dinner party, and the guest, who has just returned from traveling the world, has been asked to tell them a story...
"What could he tell? Besides, they demanded marvels of him and marvels are perhaps incommunicable; the moon of Bengal is not the same as the moon of Yemen, but it may be described in the same words."
When I read this passage I thought of Chewonki. I thought of it because of the dinner party where my parents' friend from England asked me what I had done with myself, because of the day when I returned to fencing and my teammates asked me where I had been, because of the look on my friends' faces as they ask me to describe my time with you.
Because words are not feelings, or sights, or moments in time. How can I explain the sensation of taking down your tarp after solo, your fingers numb because its fall in a**ing maine and you forgot your gloves and haven't eaten in two days, stumbling with the knot that you tied poorly, torn between the need to take it down and the urge to stay away for another minute? The moment on the porch of the wallace center, when our newest Banjoist is playing along with Scott and Scott and Charlie and time freezes for a moment? What its like to do a polar bear swim?
To be honest, I've given up. There are two students at my school who did MCS right now; I don't really talk to one as much as I should, and the other had a very different experience there and doesn't talk about it. And some of the others understand some of the stories, or think they do. But the rest: can they understand if they weren't there?
Maybe its just me. I remember being told by the Binnacle Bros that I am terrible at explaining stuff, draw it out too much, and they were right. One of my (many) flaws. But at the same time, isn't that what made MCS so special for us? the fact that, no matter how easily that one story may go, that the whole is so difficult to explain? That it is a collage of "you had to be there"'s, and that we were there?
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