Never in my life had I seen something that resembled infinity as closely as the incessant twists and turns of the Great Wall, slowly but relentlessly teasing its way to the horizon. As my eyes tried to follow each sequence of steps, from tower to tower, I felt completely insignificant, not only in a spatial, but also in a temporal way.
It had been a quite interesting week in Beijing. I had met a rather large crowd of bright young people from several parts of the world, and little by little a more structured inner group of friends had emerged. A Curaçaoan, a few Americans and Icelanders, Saudi Arabians, Russians, a Haitian, an Indian and a Brit, Canadians, a South African, and even a fellow Mexican… they were the people with whom I shared a unique experience, as we discovered the complexities of the Chinese culture, while we explored three of its major cities.
The visit to the Great Wall was something I had been expecting since I planned to attend the Conference. There is something that has always mystified me about millenary structures, pieces of the past that remain in the present to give testimony of our origins. Glorious, monstrous, perhaps disproportionate evidence that our kind has been here for longer than our generations can recount. Although their sight is almost always unexpected, and sometimes disruptive, it is never anachronical.
Alina, a Russian girl, roamed by my side through most of the stretch that we were able to walk. She had long dark hair and cinnamon skin. Her eyes were blue, with lighter circles around her pupils, and at times her gaze was so intense it was almost unbearable. Her scent was Burberry, a preference she might have acquired after living in London for several years. It rendered me weak. I fell in love, of course.
As we got introduced and talked about our lives, I couldn’t help but notice that every step we had to take was different from the previous one. The length and height of each new block seemed to have been randomly assigned, which made the task of walking more difficult than one could have imagined. It was as if each step was the life of a different man, one in front of the other, leading somewhere too far for any of them to see. I then began to wonder about the amount of time and workers needed to complete each section of the Wall. I thought of the many lives consumed by the task of building something they would never be able to fully appreciate or understand.
Alina interrupted my digressions: ‘Race me to the top!’ she shouted, and began running before I could utter a single word. I ran after her, then next to her, and finally in front of her, until I made it to the cusp. By the time I stopped, I was breathless, and had to lie on the ground. When I opened my eyes, the new vantage point allowed me to contemplate the apparent unboundedness of the Great Wall.
It occurred to me that trying to grasp the vastness of anything larger than ourselves would be a task so immense that the length of no mortal life would be enough to achieve it. Thus, any undertaking of the same nature was condemned to fail. Yet, if we were there for a reason, it had to be more than to confirm this very notion.
I began to believe that our reason to exist could only be to know ourselves, and that in the continuous and infinite sequences of existence and cognition we might, if we were lucky enough, find a way to converge to a single point of truth, to which we would be able to hold on until the end of times.
Alina arrived seconds later, and decided to take a photograph to immortalize our race. We walked down the steps together, into the bus that would take us back to our hotel, and danced to the sound of no music. My journey had begun.
