Thoughts lost and found

Last night turned out somewhat nightmarish as I happily unpacked my bag only to discover that my notebook from the monastery was gone. As far as losses go these days mine usually seem small and insignificant, but this one sure felt bad. A whole reservoir of concentrated thoughts and ideas wasted on the shores of bitter irony.

I have never lost a loved one. And I’m not really sure why. Has [insert preferred deity or other guiding principle] spared me the experience through these 28 whole years? Or have I just not loved hard enough? Anyway, I can’t compare the loss of my notebook to the loss of a loved one without compromising both my integrity and my conscience. But you get the picture.

And so, I sent my mind back a-reelin’ on the wheel of time in search of a clue.

Jazz festival, Copenhagen, summer, girlfriend, beer … Beer? Might that be it? Might I have gotten drunk in some jazzy bar, and carelessly dropped the book out of my pocket? La Fontaine had been quite crowded on Saturday, and I don’t remember getting out of there before dawn. Besides, the place was so hot the pages might actually have loosened from the spine, and left my pocket one by one.

But then I remembered writing in the book Sunday evening: ”I’m cruel towards my own nature since my own nature is cruel towards me.” Quite a statement for a last entry in a book that might be found hundreds of years from now when man has finally succeeded in subduing and destroying nature, only to find that he has acted under the influence of an even higher nature – his own.

I propelled my thoughts forward to Monday morning. But it was too early. Dawn was upon my girlfriend’s apartment, and I was still wide awake, listening to Tom Waits and having him tell the sun to sink back down. Two weeks of monastic solitude can sure make returning to work seem like the least important thing you’re ever gonna do.

A couple of hours later, and I was on the morning train out of town. Home and work is in Aarhus, Copenhagen’s beautiful baby sister across the isles. I was in the foetal position, crammed down in a two-seat womb. And there it was! My notebook. Neatly tugged in between the back of my head and the arm rest. I wanted to grab it, to stuff it down my bag. But I didn’t, I couldn’t. I hadn’t even gotten round to writing anything in it on the trip. I had just passed out cold, oblivious to anything but sleep.

I believe I let my notebook down. I carelessly took out this wonderfully personal collection of thoughts, and I just left it there, on the seat, like an abandoned child. If I don’t treasure and protect my own innermost thoughts I don’t have the right to think them, I reasoned. Then I might just as well subject myself to somebody else’s.

What a relief when I called the railways’ Lost & Found Office this morning, and was told that they had indeed come across a small black and silver notebook in one of their carriages. I rushed down to the station on my way to work, picked up the book, and put it where it ought to be – close to the heart and mind that feed its pages.

The renowned Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said something to the effect that people shouldn’t worry so much about freedom of speech. They already have freedom of thought and they don’t even seem capable of using that, he argued. If ever I might meet his thought-weary soul in the reality to come, I’ll tell him thanks for reminding me not to go around losing the only true freedom I have.