Life is young Universe’ bribe to Gods of metaphysics for a mess the Big Bang created
About the same time – in metaphysical terms that is – when his father took Jose Buendia to see ice, I went to the event which left me speechless for the rest of my life. It was November 26, 1968, a dry and clear day in Belgrade. The entire year was like a veil being lifted from my eyes, since my parents took my sister and me on a summer European tour. The Latin Quarter impressed upon my teen mind the idea of youthful revolt and destructive follow-up, visible all over the place, while hippies along the Boulevard St Michel projected the peaceful aura of the same dichotomy. Something grand was brewing, from what I could see, enjoying every moment spent in Paris. Heading homebound, we went to touch snow in July (I was this close to ice) while driving over St. Gotthard Pass, crossed the wooden Lucerne bridge before it burnt to ashes, and somewhere along the way I had my very first french fries. I bought a pack of Camel incognito, hid it at various places, and froze when the customs officer asked if had any cigarettes to declare:’We are non-smokers,’ my father proudly proclaimed, even though that wasn’t the question.
I don’t recall details any longer – they expired and sunk in way deep to justify the cost of excavation – all I remember is me and my buddy Nick going to see London-Sydney Rally, that had a stop in Belgrade. Forget ice, this was an epiphany unfolding: all kinds of cars I’d never dreamed existed, painted in multi colors, dressed up with stickers, large numbers on the door, zillion of additional lights, huge front grills. I walked around with mouth agape, as if it were an inter-galactic shipyard, forgetting the time and the place, immersing into distorted reality around me. We waited for the last car to leave, waving at them as they rushed toward Bombay via Istanbul, Tehran, and Kabul.
A fledgling in me was totally ignorant of all the rally legends I’d just met face to face. It didn’t matter then, but I’m thankful today for rubbing shoulders with one Roger Clark, Simo Lampinen, Lucien Bianchi, or Paddy Hopkirk; an equivalent of a stroll through the Rally Hall of Fame of early rally era, as well as rally history in making. That November day life wasn’t somewhere else: it was all over me like an Armani suit. Eventually the caravan drove away, but it was a blast while lasted.
Suddenly my future made full sense, the molding was cut and awaiting; I was four years away and counting. The next summer, as we vacationed on the Adriatic Coast, I stole keys to my father’s three-speed Peugeot 404 and drove circles around the hotel parking lot. Coincidentally, the same model won three prior Safari Rallies in a row. This high adrenaline exhilaration filled the molding once for all, and to this day the song remained the same.
Last Saturday my son Miro, Communication Director at ifixit.com, and his buddies at work started to prepare an old Volvo wagon for the 24 Hours of Le Mons at Sears Point. They stripped the car clean, and a week later, today, installed a Sparco racing seat and god knows what else. The idea is catching up the momentum, with more and more races across the country. Sooner or later it’ll make a dent in the automotive universe, since it costs a fraction of running in SCCA series, well known as the most affordable amateur racing.
This clangorous work in progress rekindled my racing spirit once again, yet more importantly it unveiled the real ethos of our country, the spirit of the frontier and beyond; quite refreshing after all the doom-and-gloomers and nostradamuses laid out their flawed theories, spitting their pitiful intestines into ever evolving human spirit. What they fail to recognise is a simple fact: being pessimistic or optimistic has nothing to do with the mission of universe, which is inherently moving toward more life: its impelling motive is the acceleration of existing substance. Unfortunately, Einstein refused to write ‘The Brief History of Universe for Idiots’. Do they sincerely believe the initial explosion of matter will stall in its tracks in order to accommodate their petty vanities? Well, do you, punks?
Nowadays there is an outrageous disrespect when it comes to life as we know it. With so many goodies taken for granted, life ceases to be a game of exposure and mutates into a game of weakness. Me and my fellow humans used to build and give, now we demand and beg for more. This made for a set of living arrangements worthy of a French farce, a spawning ground for florid food stamps. The word shame is wiped out of every vocabulary as none of quasi politicians has guts to draw a line at the buffet, close the kitchen, and kick the ‘victims’ out. In the meantime, life leaks away down the Cloaca Maxima, roads will wish for the Young Turks to proudly gallop their horses once more – but there will be no Turks anymore.
During 1943 and 1944 Viktor Frankl would frequently walk the streets of the walled town of Theresienstadt – turned into a ghetto under Gestapo – to deliver his ‘Psychotherapeutic Experience in a Concentration Camp’ lecture to an imaginary audience. The vision of him giving the same speech to a university class after the war saved his sanity and made him a survivor, as he realized that life has a meaning no matter how harsh the circumstances are: ‘But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire’.
