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Description
I have always experienced a peculiar kind of relationship with society. Since I remember myself as a part of it, I’ve been going through frequently alternating periods of extreme attitudes regarding my feelings towards my fellow humans. I have loved them and hated them passionately beyond intervals of utter indifference, teetering on a conceptual, emotional scale between altruism and misanthropy.
Throughout my entire life, I’ve been basically living over and over this cycle: I am weary of people… I have to retreat from public life… I sequester myself in a dim room or amid some remote wilderness… Solitude, privacy, relief, tranquility, enlightenment… Loneliness… My mind grows discordant and my soul wild by the day… Who am I? I have approached the threshold of madness… I need someone to talk to; someone to touch; someone to remind me I am a human… I long for company. I crave humanity. I’m coming in… Hello, city! Hello, friends, brothers, affection! Let’s party, interact, inspire, create. Let’s evolve together!… I am getting a little tired of people…
During my life’s sociable spells, I’ve been regularly reaching out to disparate factions of civilization. Already since the time I was growing up in my small hometown – an unusually unrestrained and clinically curious kid – I enjoyed associating with individuals spanning the full range of ages and coming from an utmost diversity of backgrounds. I never had a best friend, and I rarely developed connections of meaningful intimacy, but I changed circles of companionship as often as I changed underwear (literally; I was less bothered about washing clothes than your average person is).
Coming to age, I was running out of choice for sensory novelty and decided to roam the globe. I have since lived and traveled in more than a third of the world’s countries, where I’ve bumped into an astounding diversity of cultures and characters. So many people I have indeed met in my life that I hardly make an effort to remember someone’s name anymore. I do, though, have a tendency to retain stories.
And I love telling stories. I value my recollections as my most treasured possession and principal mental currency. Collecting and expressing memories is my equivalent of wealth-building and spending. Naturally, a considerable part of my retrospection and wistfulness is centered around personalities; mainly personalities of bizarre, extraordinary characters; characters that resemble beach puddles splattered off the ocean’s margins.
What I consider as such is not the likes of people you would watch on TV or read about in lifestyle magazines and idealized novels. They aren’t the sort of decorated, huge-success, fancy-life personas you will skim through on Instagram…
They are unattended, enigmatic characters with passions, vices, eternal dreams, and real stories to tell. They are what I perceive as raw, unembellished personalities or, simply, real people.
It was about four years ago it dawned on me to start writing stories of such people. My sole criterion for picking protagonists out of a boundless pool of such remarkable, memory-sticking encounters was momentary inspiration. A common characteristic that, with a few exceptions, the stories shared is that they feature people I maintained no contact with and whose subsequent fates I am wholly unaware of.
These stories eventually grew into a small collection that, combined with a few more, similar stories I translated from my Greek travelogue From Cape Town to Alexandria, I decided to publish in this book.
