24/6/07

Your conviction that your life and all attempts at self-realisation in it ('professional', existential, amorous) are essentially pathetic (in both senses of the word) is of course self-fulfilling; it is also one you apply to others. This is something you (again) came aware of on reading M.: where he found exhilaration, wonderment, joy etc. you found only trite middle-class pieties (to misquote the man himself). No doubt this capacity of his in part accounts for his success with women: he made them 'feel good' about themselves, whereas you require from them that they make you feel good about yourself. It is not surprising that he got considerably more takers.
There is no going back to your 'old self', the one who, though perhaps capable of thoughts like these, would never have dreamt of putting them down on paper (on the ludicrous principle that a thought unexpressed is as good as nonexistent). This is just as well, but there are occasionally times when you miss that determined suppression of your own internal life - which you (rightly in a sense) associated with regret, self-pity and stagnation, and which is bound up with memories of your first visit here. There was something liberating in emptying yourself into your work - or at least your actions - and there being nothing of significance left over. The east has the effect of shocking you out of self-absorption: this presumably is one reason while you feel better not so much while you are here, but upon returning from here.

One possibility that neither Lem in his book nor Tarkovsky in his film considered, but that Soderbergh did (and it is his one at least half-successful innovation) is that one of the crew on the station in Solaris might be visited by precisely himself. This then opens up the possibility of one of the two killing his double and then finding himself unable to tell with certainty whether he is the original or the copy (in much the same way that the ventriloquist 'becomes' his dummy after 'killing' it in the film The Dead of Night). But Lem and Tarkovsky seemed to imagine that the real of one's desire could only be manifested in another person - not oneself, or more specifically, an earlier version of oneself (which, at least in their 'alternate' forms, we know to be haunting us).