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Beware of Getting What You Want
According to Schopenhauer, your desires are insatiable because they’re not your own
Spring is coming
In the inland villages where the British people live, it’s already here. Mimosa trees hang heavy with flowers the color of sunshine, and warm soil calls insects and reptiles out of sleep. Where I live on the coast, in a gap in the mountains that channels the northern wind from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, it’s colder. The sun shines every day, but the wind keeps the temperature down.
Except the wind doesn’t always blow. And when it doesn’t, the ocean fills with light, and I pack a bag and walk along the port to the beach.
There’s an old stone wall that catches the sun, pierced by narrow vertical gaps like the murder holes of a castle. Tumbled rocks patched here and there with corroded concrete run from the bottom of the wall into the water below. Black shellfish cluster on the lower parts of the rocks that shine with moisture, gulping nourishment from the waves that roll past them, leaving them exposed once again to the sun.
It’s perfect. And I have a book and a laptop and a flask of something sweet to drink, and nowhere to be but here and nothing to do but this. To listen to the sea chattering between the rocks and…
