30.2.583
What is this strange emotion that is seeping up from my toes, from my legs—this is the only way that I can write what I feel, though it is inaccurate—and entering into the place inside my chestwhere my heartbeats? Some, I have heard, call it joy. Some say it lives in a bottle of raki. Some know it as the daemon spirit of the countless taverns that line the harbour. I have never been drunk in my whole life. Thrice, perhaps, I have sipped alcohol from a glass and felt a few minutes later its inevitable effect on my head, accellerated by an empty stomach. My precious head! But what I feel now is other than drunken pleasure, for it is deeper, finer, more noble, and I will call it joy.
I think I feel joy because I tread my wonderful path of bright light.
I cannot be certain of this. I do not deal in certainties—though I do like them. Nogoth life is uncertain life and I have learned this lesson well. But it seems to me that joy is approaching, seeping down from the high strata of the citidenizenry, offering me hope, and, perhaps, though it seems unlikely, sustenance. And yet, why not? Why should the Mavrosopolis not recognise the potential that resides in me? I am sensitive to absurdity, and I find it absurd to think that the Mavrosopolis would ignore anyone so useful, not to mention so driven as myself.
I am an apprentice now. I have to show myself not as the person I am, but as the person I will become. I have to think forward into time and imagine how it will be when I am a citidenizen—so good, so true, so right—that somehow I might clothe myself in correct attributes, and be recognised as the fine fellow I will be.
I am impatient with the people of the Tower of the Thawers. They are stolid, rational, slow, deliberate people, and I do not like their attitude. They see me as a freak because I like poetry. Might a nogoth not find poetry if he was desperate?
May there not be a poetry of gutter despair? I contend that there may be. But these thawers do not like it. They say I speak out of place. I tell them that I will speak in place for the sake of the Mavrosopolis, but inside my head I am formulating verse.
Inside my head is a place they can never reach.
I worry too about the emphasis they place on physical labour. I am tall and I bend like a reed. My back is weak. There is nothing wrong with this. My arms are thin and the lumps of muscle upon them are slight. There is nothing wrong with this, either. If I run fast I am soon out of breath, for I have poor stamina, and if I am asked to lift anything, or to fetch anything, I do the job poorly. But physical labour is not a task meant for one such as I. A thinker, me, one who considers, one, most important of all, who wants to find the location of peace. Is this so much to ask? Certainly, others have asked similar questions, and these others may also have sought the bright path. But where are they?
I have decided on one thing. I am prepared to give that I might receive. I know what I want and I am prepared—though perhaps not happy—to work for the end that I desire. My apprenticeship has shown me that such an equation is possible, indeed that it is one of the backbones of life in the citidenizenry. This strongly suggests that the citidenizenry is a happy place, a station in life where people may find fulfilment. I am looking forward to passing the test.