Despite his wish to survive being fulfilled, it was the aristocratic
life he yearned for. Only leisure was life. A laborer was just
movement and reflexes. A laborer did not run barefoot through the
weeds and allow the smells to be one with him, transfer the beauty to a
complex style on canvas when the beauty passed through his complicated
mind, or attempt to understand why the pollen attacked him like a
sickness. He wanted someone to grant him the honors of placing him in
an orange robe, which he felt he was entitled to have--that special
robe not of monks but of the type that surely belonged to aristocrats.
He wanted leisure to see the rhapsody of every small movement under the
lambency of both sun and moon. He wanted to meditate on coruscating
city life as the Buddha of Bangkok. He wanted to be free of the
noodles that were winding about him tightly and to grasp the leisure
that should be his and no doubt was his in an earlier life. Poverty
ravaged the mind in desperate acts--the mind ached in one continual
groan for something within or without that might be sold. No
appreciation of the present moment could be had in such a state.
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