The weather in London was so miserable over the weekend that I felt like checking out how it must feel to travel to another planet.
So I watched 2001: Space Odyssey.
I was surprised to see that it has become much easier for me to sit through the final part of the movie, the one about “Jupiter and beyond the Infinite”.
That is when, to quote Wikipedia, astronaut Dave Bowman “appears to travel across vast distances of space and time through a ‘Star Gate’, a tunnel of colorful light and imagery and sound”.
I always had problems with these scenes when I was younger. I didn’t get them. They would unsettle me. I just wanted someone to tell me where Dave Bowman was going. Full stop.
On Friday, I discovered that they no longer unsettle me. Why is this happening?
I have been thinking and I believe that the fact that I finally got it, after so many years, has something to do with my living abroad for most of my adult life.
Moving around has felt like going through a “tunnel of colorful light”. You have to remain flexible. The places that accompanied you yesterday are not here to lead you into the next stage.
So you just watch the colors go by…
And every time I enter my old bed room in Italy, I feel a bit like Dave Bowman entering that surreal room with its Biedermeier furniture, so reassuring (for someone like me who spent so much time in Austria) but at the same time so alien.
And I do love Strauss’s An der schoenen blauen Donau . Like in the case of this movie, it has been the soundtrack of my life.
Listening to it gives me a sense of the time flowing, of an era that was better (but why did it lead to horrible things then?).
And I see myself dressed in a long pink gown attending a ball in another surreal setting, Prague’s Palac Kultury. It is the winter of 1991. I am leaving the ball and dancing in the snow on my way to the Nusle valley together with a friend…
Prague is awakening from a surreal dream only to find that it cannot go back to the time before it fell asleep. The Biedermeier room is gone. Only time travelling would help in this case…if only we knew how.
Well, I will be going back to Prague in April, for the first time in two years.
One never knows…
Photo: thanks to www.imdb.com
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