Angst

I spent the afternoon watching Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and drinking a very good bottle of rioja that was meant as a gift for a friend, but somehow ended up being drunk almost entirely by me.

If you haven’t seen Wings of Desire you should. It is beautiful and uplifting. It also has Columbo in it, but don’t let that confuse you; it all makes perfect sense.

In outline, the film is about angels who walk around Berlin, listening to the inner thoughts of its inhabitants and noting them for posterity. The tenderness with which the angels listen is very moving. They rest their heads on the thinker’s shoulder, their arm encircling like a lover. They yearn to offer comfort, but the thinkers (for the most part) are unaware of their presence.

The main angel falls in love with a human woman, who reminded me strongly of someone I don’t like to think of, which only served to somehow make her more beautiful. At the end of the film she delivers a monologue that makes you feel like you are holding hands with everyone else in the world at once. It is a meditation on love and loneliness, and it will comfort all those who are weary of heart.

On the way home I sat at the bus stop and wondered if angels do exist. If they follow us around town, holding us up somehow when we falter, encircling us with their arms. I imagined my mother’s mother and my mother’s father on either side of me, leaning on my shoulders, giving me strength. On the bus I watched the people: the tiny Jewish man full of nerves, the sleepy Chinese girl, the angry black actress, and wished I could hear their thoughts as the angels could.

My own thoughts these days are so loud and so insistent I wonder that the world can’t hear them. I have stopped listening to my iPod as I travel, as to drown out my thoughts is to deny them, and that seems like a crime. I think about love, and loss, and pain, and death, the sound of trains, the shape of a stranger’s face, that feeling of immense tiredness that accompanies the start of a difficult journey, how I wish I could speak fluently the language of my relatives, why trying to escape is just like being forced to look in a mirror, how to let go, when I will walk in the woods again, whether one can climb on the ‘o’ in ‘Hollywood’, what a ship sounds like at night, when I will kiss the back of my lover’s neck again.

Tomorrow I am going on a strange journey. Tiredness and vague anxieties overwhelm me, but the angels carry me onwards as they always do.