“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

One of the joys of being cross-cultural is finding yourself in the position of inhabiting multiple perspectives but not owning any of them. You’re an oddly-invested gatecrasher to multiple weddings happening at the same time in different function rooms of a hotel. You feel emotionally invested in the proceedings, the people there, the internecine conflicts, the traditional music playing, the patois and the cultural shorthand, but whenever one wedding gets too cringe, too insular, or simply too hilariously predictable and too grotesque, you can cleanse your palate by shuffling down the hall to the next room and temporarily disavowing previous furtive cultural allegiances. You can quite literally be very serious about being extremely non-committal, because you don’t have much choice in the matter. You simultaneously belong to a culture, undeniably and inescapably and yet also are a complete imposter, a tourist with an open-ended return ticket. You don’t have the skin in the game because of conflicting allegiances, or rather, your heart is simply too big, is a kinder way of putting it.

That’s how I’ve been feeling watching the Hand of God, The Truffle Hunters, Succession, and reading Emily Bitto’s Wild Abandon. From the empire celebrating its self-aware superiority, to the empire that never was, to the yearning provincialism of the remote empire.

What saddened me most during the purgatory that was the past two years of lockdown and closed borders was the sense that my world had shrunk. The wedding hotel had gone silent and boarded up its doors, and I paced my neighbourhood feeling like a goldfish in a bowl. Cinema helped — it is nothing if not a device for traversing worlds — but it at times felt like the consolation of the incarcerated.

But, the city is open once more. Who knows for how long. I must make the best of it, so this hungry, restless soul can avoid stultification.