Report from the interior

The first book I read this year was Paul Austers ‘Report from the interior’, his autobiography and the sequal to his ‘Winter Journal’ in which he describes the history of his body. This time, his interior is under scrutiny and

It took a while for me to appreciate biographies, I guess I never was that interested in people until I discovered which biographies to read. I started with Hemingway’s biographies

To me writers are the supreme artists, builders of place, time and consciousness. Paintings and music only

Auster is sorry that he didn’t keep a journal in his younger years, and the same thought has crossed my mind many times. I’ve tried frequently, I have multiple notebooks lying around all empty after a few starts and awkward beginnings. Some of these beginnings were typed over for this blog. I like reading back the little things I did write, even if they are written poorly. They offer insights into the person I was. Time goes fast and people change.

I am glad for this blog. I started it in a period in my life just after my graduation from Leiden University, just after my hard breakup with what I still consider to be the one closest to the love of my life and while I was jobless and directionless.

To me, Leiden was my Paris. Leiden were my formative years.

I must write more often. And the purpose of todays blog is just that, a short update for my future self. A short report on the interior of the last years. The books I liked and read, the movies I liked and read, my political preoccupations and the mood I was in.

I came to Leiden University aged 23, but I could as well have been 16. I was immature, socially awkward and insecure. I had little experience with women. The reasons were eight years of Israel and two years of mandatory enlistment to the IDF. Then in november ’98 I wanted to prove to myself and my peers that I too could be a combat soldier. Instead of choosing a more appropriate unit like military intelligence where I could excel in thought, I wanted to prove myself in battle.

I saw no battle, even though I sometimes wished I was dead. I just wasn’t up for it. It wasn’t the physical hardship that got the better of me, it was purely mentally and socially. I just didn’t fit in with my company and the

I was a dropout for the first time in my life and I felt a failure for a long long time after. I was disappointed with myself to the core. I was officially unfit, I was seriously flawed. I couldn’t see it any other way. Long after my army experiences haunted me, it still sometimes does in my sleep. In my dreams I am back with my company, and sometimes it ends well, with me doing something heroic, and sometimes I fail all over again. Sometimes I dream about not taking that plane back to the Netherlands, stuck in Israel, sometimes my family who followed me a few months later to the Netherlands move back leaving me alone and in dispair.

After my discharge I got my first major depression and if it werent for my parents who put me on a plane with a one way ticket to the Netherlands I might never have recovered.