Empathy

I went to retrieve my long chain today and oddly enough it was not there. It appeared as though it had been there for years untouched with plants growing under and over it- but it had disappeared. Maybe someone saw the value in it after I had expressed an interest in it- and had finally gotten permission to take it. Since Evelyn and John were making a trip into Tartu- I wanted to take advantage of their offer to take a load of things to the gallery. After calculating that I would need roughly 75 bricks to fill three windows- Evelyn calculated that her car could hold about half of that weight in bricks. So there will need to be two trips.
Recently I have been able to relate to this feeling that Marcel has expressed, where when you do not hear back from someone you have written to- you start to think about all of the different ways that you may have offended them- & worry that they are mad at you. I think that it is the isolation that causes this kind of paranoia. Everyone else is just going about their life, but from the slow standpoint of Mooste, or from the prison- it almost feels like people are actively ignoring you if you do not hear back from them. I think it is the combination of large quantities of time and very limited human interaction- that tends to amplify the importance of the interactions that you do have, or hope to have. At some moments I find myself huddled next to my laptop, as though it were a fireplace, something to warm me with feelings of social connectedness....
I heard from my mom that Marcel wrote her a letter about being the sickest that he has ever been in prison this past week. He was sweating in his bed- and even had to hang up his sheets and blanket in the middle of the night- while shivering as he waited for them to dry out. And yet, Marcel considers himself lucky to not have caught pneumonia like some of the others. Once again, my own worries and concerns about things like whether or not to attend Art Basel during my week off seem so privileged. Despite my efforts to put myself in a remote & disorienting place such as Mooste, in order to relate more to Marcel’s experiences I hardly feel like I have a glimpse of the social isolation that he experiences living all of those years in those same yards, corridors, cells... After the sun has set & my solitude turns towards loneliness- I wonder to myself how empathy (to put yourself in someone elses shoes) is possible?
Estonian word of the day: "Erutus" meaning emotion.