Well, I don’t quite know yet, but I was thinking about some topics this past days. I was wandering in a track near a lake in Stavanger when I gathered all the information and, when I got home, I started to write about it.
I watched “Alice in the cities” two weeks ago, by Win wenders. I’ve came all the way to Norway to watch this movie, since I never found it in Brasil. Actually, I found it very appropriate and I’m glad I’ve just seen this now: I would have never understood the movie otherwise. It happens that after 2 months in Norway I’ve discovered what I am here for. I mean, not that I was trying to figure it out, but I just realized after watching it. I’ve been here to learn to be alone. Kinda weird, but it’s truth.
The movie tells about a man who is lost on his own way to do a journalistic essay about landscape in America. Having failed to write the essay, he starts to take Polaroid pictures of the landscape. When the time to come back to Germany comes, a little girl come across his way, and he suddenly see himself got into trying to find the girl’s family, all the way from America, passing through Amsterdam and finally in his home town.
Wenders, speaking on a interview, said something that made complete sense to me. After wandering for a whole day in New York, without the possibility to fly back to Germany at that day, the main character of the movie goes to his ex-girlfriend apartment. Getting there he just starts to speak all about his experience in the US, about the photos, the landscape, the lack of sense and meaning and the road trip he made. She just nods, lights a cigar, talks some in return, while he starts to take his shirt off. In the precise moment that he start to take off his pants, she tells him: “No, you’re not sleeping here tonight”. “It’s gone man, it’s past.” The thing is that he was trying to get back to his last estate of meaning in his life. He didn’t realize that things have changed now, and he needed a new setting on his life.
About this, Wenders said that the man had forgotten how to live by himself. He forgot how to be lonely. And that’s the main reason why I’m writing this stuff. To learn to be lonely, in all the possible meanings. Not to just don’t have someone around, like a girlfriend or some like this, but to BE alone, to wander alone, to LIVE alone. It seems like a curse, but in the course of time, it proves to be the most challenging and rewarding. Often people who can get alone can perfectly be with other people, but not the same when it comes the opposite. To be alone means to be face to face with who you are and struggle hard with it. It also means to face the world in the way you see it by yourself, to discover that you can’t tell about US, unless it is on your Polaroid camera. There’s so much to say about it, but I don’t seem to have the words right now.
About the movie, that’s the point on which the little girl joins the story, to teach the journalist how to be alone again and how to restart his life. Well, 10 months in Norway seems a lot lonely to me. And I’m very grateful to God about this opportunity to work, study, photograph and get to know tons of people and to be, in a very humble way, a stop on these people’s roads. It’s a great privilege, I must say.
But well, here I am, learning to be alone again =)
