A crack in the wall of everyday life: from Pink Floyd to Suzanne Vega

It´s been a while. I could say I was busy, I was tired, I was lazy, and that I was all those things, maybe all of them at the same time, and I wouldn´t be lying. As a modern woman, I am as busy as modern women usually are: always in a hurry, worried about many things, waking up and rushing in, having a feeling of physical and mental weariness from the moment I get up from my bed and face the mirror for the first time with the mouth full of toothpaste. I try to concentrate particularly on the toothpaste and not on the creases around my eyes or on the dark circles around the same pair of eyes. I am a sort of an old humanized panda, and that´s why I focus on brushing my teeth.

The modern life. A friend sent me an audio with the famous commencement speech to Kenyon College Class of 2005 written by David Foster Wallace. He knows I am a huge fan of his. I particularly like his essays and short stories, and I know some consider this speech bad, one of the worst things he has ever written, but there are many truths there, especially when he describes the everyday life almost every living person who happens to be alive and kicking in a modern society. We live in cities, we face huge traffic jams, pollution, violence of different types. We eat in a hurry, we´re bombed by information while we try to digest our food altogether with the news coming from the TV, or tablets or smartphones, or from all of them at the same time. 

And all of those things reminded me of a very old video that I never really liked from a song that was never among my favorites, but one of the terrible things about our memory is that we don´t really control what we do remember and what we do forget. Sometimes, we would love to forget somethings but never do, and that´s really unfortunate, but I remember a scene from a Pink Floyd video, The Wall: kids being grinded and turned into sausages. And this is how I feel: as I am being grinded, and turned into minced beef .

And another great aspect of Wallace´s speech is when he makes us realize that that´s the way the world is and that is nothing personal, since many others are in the same traffic jam with us. It´s nothing personal. In fact, it´s just the exact opposite: it´s all about not being personal at all! More than seven billion of us, trying to make a living, being turned into minced meat. 

But don´t you gonna be thinking that I would rather give up living in a city and having the comforts of a modern life. No way. I would just love having some slow motion moments in my daily routine, some starring at the wall moments, looking for a crack, who knows? A breach to a different world.