Serendipity

It all started with a Time Out card that offered a discounted membership to the ICA. And there I saw the film All This Can Happen. I found the film absolutely amazing, old footage, but the way it was put together was sheer magic. A voice-over was reading The Walk by Robert Walser. I kept on trying to remember the name Tomzack, until I came home and forgot it. I borrowed Walser from the library, though, and read The Walk, and remembered the footage, and found Tomzack again. A writer friend of mine mentioned that Walser died during another walk, in the snow. And also that W.G. Sebald liked him. Sebald being one of my favourite writers. One of the short stories in Walser's book is about Heinrich von Kleist, another author new to me, another solitary person, like Walser, like me. I was also watching a BBC programme yesterday about still life and they were talking about Cezanne, who became a solitary person and just painted objects from his studio. All of these magical people, though, were somewhat connected to other great artists and writers of the time. Now we are all connected through social networks, the good the bad and the ugly, and it takes up an extraordinary amount of time to get back what seems to me very little. Everything is so vast and time consuming, so, although all of these networks are supposed to bring us together, we are in fact more isolated, I believe, than before. It takes too much time to sift through what is original and refreshing and real. It seems to me that now it is all down to serendipity, islands you mysteriously bump into while lost at sea.