Finding Magic


Musings / Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

Is not an illusion. Is not a reality. Is not a tempestous plunge into fantasy. What is Magic? Wandering through London, I thought of this. The noises of the streets blending into a headache. A jetlag that carved a sword through my tiredness. A myriad number of people I cared not to meet and one I did want to meet. The Saturday night of fake artificiality that gorged itself for me on to absolute boredom. Where was Magic?

Would it on the Thames? On the HMS Belfast? At Southwark Cathedral? At Buckhingam? At Windsor? It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there at the British Library either. Magic was not on view there at the Globe or the Tate.

Magic flew around me. I did not see. Magic hugged me. I couldn’t feel it. I saw it then. Magic doesn’t exist.

On a pale evening light when the sun was close to dimming down the day, when I realized that Magic doesn’t exist, only then Magic became real. I knew then that most travel writing is superflous – we can’t really feel the moment till we are out of it. All we are doing till then is just gawking at spectacles, and buildings, at monuments enough to forget the moments. Then later we collect them in our minds, turn them over from all the corners it has gathered, and wrapped in the past’s comfortable presence, we feel, oh wow, how magical was that.

Is all magic just that? No. But Magic doesn’t exist until we deny it.

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