Somewhere I had mentioned that I almost oddly remember my encounter with books, movies or philosophical questions. Like from where/whom or why I'd been recommended or heard about them. It was the end of 2013. The first thing most immigrants will do in some foreign land is open a bank account or something important, but I went to the library and got my library card. Glenroy library was half a kilometer away from our first rental apartment. That freshness of the air, less traffic, brewing local coffee—all I can just remember now. Next to the train station there was one big tree on the side of the bus station. Next to the bus station there was one coffee shop.

When we had first landed in this part of the world, me and my wife, after resting a few hours in the apartment, went on an evening stroll and sat there near that big tree. I immediately felt the new air and new world. I was missing my home, my birds, my dog, my brother, my parents and that familiar air where I had spent 22 years of my life. While I am writing this now, I still feel that evening inside my bones, how much I missed my home at that time. The only thing I could wish for was to take me to the country road to the place where I belong[1] but we are restrained by many boundaries. Time wouldn't allow that.

Later when I read through Bukowski, I felt that the immigrant's struggle recapitulates the agonistic wrestling of the strong poet. Like Jacob at Peniel, we grapple with the angel of the new tongue until it blesses us, even if that blessing comes as always a wound.

That first evening beneath the eucalyptus by the bus station—and what tree is not a figure for organic memory, for the vertical reach between earth and transcendence? I had only memories of the Ficus religiosa, Jacaranda or Pipal trees—I felt the terrible sublimity of exile. The bamboo groves of home, those Wordsworthian spots of time where evening birds returned in their clamorous parliament, had become unreachable, consigned to that undiscovered country Bloom called the Scene of Instruction, forever receding behind us even as it constitutes us. Collecting all those memories, I had finished writing one memoir-style recollection book, which had landed on an editor's desk a few months ago. Fingers crossed that it would do well.

We spent a few hours there, looking at the trains and buses passing. The serenity of the small town—I was befuddled by it. I had that mixed feeling of missing home and starting a new life on this other side of the world. 'Let's go,' my wife said. 'Let's take the longer route this time,' she said. Then we started walking back to the apartment via the longer route—longer by maybe just 100 meters. Just one new extra street to cross. On the way back I saw that library but it was closed, so I decided to come back tomorrow and have a look inside. When going to my work this afternoon, my regular bus didn't show up and I had to wait longer than usual and took a new route; that time it reminded me of that day—taking the longer route. But that longer route was fortunate.

Then the second day, we went earlier to the library and wished to get the library card. I had never seen such a polite person at the reception desk before. That made my exile feel a little lesser. I still remember her old, wrinkled face, but it was shining with great light. She didn't understand our new way of speaking English, of course, but she was patient. She filled out the form on her standing computer while my wife was busy spelling our first and last names with grave care. Whenever I see the birds flying in the sky towards their home in the evening, chirping and vying with each other, it reminds me of my home—not their rush but their alignment with beauty. I recall we had (still have) a huge bamboo grove near our house, where they would come in the evening. And you can't believe or could imagine their shriek inside the bamboo grove—loud but soothing—that I recall about where the world ends with peace not with a bang. When I saw the vast books aligning within the aisles I thought for a second—'ah! The chirping birds with philosophical wings'.

After getting the virtual-library-bar-card-code in a few minutes—even those black and white bars were surreal to me, felt like a gateway to vast readings—I wandered through the aisles. The smell of old books mixed with the faint scent of furniture polish. I didn't know what I was looking for exactly. Something to anchor me in this new place, maybe. Something to make the apartment feel less empty, less foreign. My wife went to the children's section, looking at picture books, though we had no children then. I distinctly remember now, after 14 years, she might have been drawn by the colorful presentation of that child-corner which was adorned with the name—happy corner.

What a culture, I thought. I saw her through the corner of my eye, peeking through the aisles, and I thought she was just trying to find something familiar, something simple in a world that had suddenly become very complicated. For about an hour we had completely forgotten that we have to work, find work, study and pay rent, miss home, pay tax, all of it. We were soaked in the atmosphere of that library. I was lost in the philosophy section for a while but everything I had already heard of them—old philosophy—Plato, Hume, Leviathan (that book I heard about back home but never read before). I decided to borrow a few unheard-of philosophy books including that Dalai Lama's speech collection.

After, I found myself in the fiction section, running my fingers along the spines—like actors do in the movies. Authors I didn't know, authors I'd heard of but never read. And then I saw it. A worn-out copy of Post Office by Charles Bukowski. I was not attracted by the author but his last name. I pronounced it again and again. It's childish, but it felt like a hymn. The cover was nothing special, a bit tattered actually, but the author's last name spoke to me. So I pulled it out. That's how I got to know Bukowski. After that I read all six novels and almost all poems in the coming six or seven months. That day I borrowed another book too—which left me with instant admiration—that was A. B. Facey's A Fortunate Life, the only book written by this Australian author, at the age of 80 or something.

Okay, let's talk about Bukowski today. I didn't know anything about him. Didn't know he was this underground legend, this dirty old man of American literature, this poet of the gutter and the bar stool. I just saw Post Office and thought, maybe this will tell me something about work, about surviving the mundane, about getting through days that all look the same. And after this book, this dirty old man's philosophy never left me. That night, back in our shared apartment with our two suitcases still not fully unpacked, nothing there to sleep on, no mattress, nothing. We spread our home-packed bed sheet on the carpeted floor and slept like this for a month.

I started reading him and Bukowski thrashed me like a train I didn't see coming. His voice was raw, unfiltered, brutal in its honesty. Henry Chinaski, his protagonist, his alter ego, was nothing like the heroes I'd read about in books before. He wasn't noble. I am not defining it now; I felt that after a few pages. He wasn't trying to save anyone. He was just trying to survive, survive in this brutal, unethical world, to get through his shifts at the post office, to drink his beer, to find a woman who wouldn't drive him completely insane. That was his life. That was simple philosophy but profoundly missed by ordinary human beings. There was something about his directness that felt like a relief. In those early days in Australia, I found everyone was so polite, so carefully worded. The woman at the library, remember, the people at the grocery store, even the bus drivers with their gentle "thanks, mate" when you got off. Funny, I am still working on that Australian 'mate' anyway. It was nice, don't get me wrong, but later, it also felt like everyone was performing politeness, and I was performing being okay, performing being excited about this new life, when really I just wanted to sit under that big tree by the bus station and cry for my dog, for my bamboo grove, for the familiar chaos of home.

Bukowski didn't perform anything. He told you straight up: life is hard, work is soul-crushing, people are complicated and often disappointing, and yet somehow you keep going. He said somewhere 'Don't try'. Even his gravestone reads that. People took that differently but what he meant—to understand that you need to live a life like him—he had a huge backpack on his back and I have got the same backpack on my back but different shades maybe. During those few weeks, fortunately I got one job. You get up, you go to work, you come home, you drink, you write, you fuck, you sleep, you do it all again. Doing, repeating all those ordinary human acts. There I found something almost comforting in his bleakness. It made my own displacement feel less dramatic, less like a tragedy and more like just another thing that happens in a life. He actually patted my back in those earlier days of Australia saying, 'alright mate, you would do great, just a little further need to step'.

I read Post Office in ten days. Stayed up late on that 10th night to finish it (not exactly stayed up; I was going to have my night shift), sitting on a fancy train compartment, but I had imagined sitting on our cheap unbranded mattress that we'd bought with our first paychecks, and the Melbourne winter seeping through the walls. When I finished, I just sat there for a while, looked at those African-Australian people in the next seat, the book closed in my lap. My wife had already fallen asleep. I phoned her. 'Are you sleeping?' I asked. 'The apartment is quiet except for the occasional car passing outside. It's nice but something's not nice, it's too quiet,' she said in her sleepy voice. I reached my job at 12:30 at night and started sweeping the floor or scrubbing maybe.

After reading a few of his other books, actually reading after Factotum, I shouted, 'He is a fucking Underground Übermensch', and he taught me the necessary illusion—not that suffering is redemptive (the Christian lie), nor that it is meaningless (the nihilist's weak evasion), but that it simply is, and that in acknowledging its isness without flinching, we perform the only authentic act of creation available to us. While hosing grills I thought I might become an Übermensch one day; that was hopeful. 'This is the daemonic knowledge', I thought, 'the Gnostic understanding that we are thrown into a world not of our making and must forge meaning from our own wrestling with contingency.' I stopped hosing in that TGIF back dock and jotted it down in my Evernote app. Then I started comparing his philosophy with Nietzsche. They speak differently but they spelled out the same human-fatigue. Their philosophy was the same with different garments. I thought about Chinaski delivering mail, about how he described the mind-numbing routine of it, the physical toll, the absurdity of the postal system's bureaucracy. I thought about my own new job, which I had started in the third week of my arrival. Would I be able to do it? Would I be good enough? Would my English be good enough? Would people understand me, or would they have that same patient, slightly confused expression as the librarian, kind but clearly working to decipher my accent?

After reading him I quickly learned one thing: however much you try, life would give you less. I was after all incarnating myself as Schopenhauer; I thought about that later that night. If anyone reads him with care, Bukowski seemed to say: it doesn't matter, always and everywhere in his poems, diary, in his drinking, in his women. You do the work or you don't. You survive or you don't. Nobody's keeping score except you, and even that score doesn't mean much in the end. Over the next few months, I went back to that library many times. I checked out more Bukowski. Ham on Rye, Factotum, Women. I bought my first Kindle, 7th generation, and downloaded all his writings. Then his poetry. I devoured it all. My wife would joke that I was becoming obsessed with this drunk American writer, and maybe I was. But he was teaching me something about this new life. He was teaching me that you don't have to pretend it's all beautiful. You can acknowledge the grind, the loneliness, the absurdity, and still keep going.

I started writing again too. I had finished one fiction manuscript back home before immigrating here, which was later published in 2019. Too much to deal with, too much to organize and figure out. But reading Bukowski made me want to write again. Not poetry like his, exactly, but something. Notes about this new place. Observations. Memories of home. I bought a cheap notebook from the newsagent near the train station (I still have that notebook) and started writing notes, which became the backbone of Who Will Bury The Dead God later, which was published in 2024. Looking back now, more than a decade later, I see that encounter with Post Office as a kind of baptism into my new life. Bukowski didn't make the homesickness go away. He didn't make the displacement easier. He didn't even make my tomfoolery disappear. But he gave me a language for it, a way to think about survival that wasn't about triumph or success or achieving the immigrant dream. I became whole. He was a German immigrant too. His Ham on Rye tells the story about his childhood and adulthood in America. YES, in a nutshell, it was just about getting through. About finding beauty in small things—a cold beer after work, a good sentence, a moment of connection with another person, even if fleeting.

Last year, after seven years, when we were there along with our parents, we missed visiting the old places. The Glenroy library is still there because I still get emails of the curated list from them. The library is not dead yet. I don't know if the big tree by the bus station is still there or not, or it might have died with so-called development. Because when we were passing fleetingly by the Glenroy station by Metro, I saw the overhead bridge where there was that big tree. But when I pass by, I still feel that first evening, that mixture of loss and possibility. While I write this, I feel overwhelmed by the past. And I think about that worn copy of Post Office, which I eventually bought my own EPUB copy of and still have on my Kindle shelf. It's marked up now, passages underlined, pages dog-eared if it would have been a physical copy. Bukowski probably would have hated being someone's comfort read, someone's guide to immigration and displacement. He would have laughed at the earnestness of it. But that's what he became for me. He became a hero-writer. He became a second-god to me as his god was John Fante. That's the rough, profane, honest voice telling me it's okay to not be okay, that life is messy and hard and sometimes beautiful despite itself, and that you just keep going, one day after another, until you don't.

Honestly, that ugly man I admire the most. These days if I have to reply to the question how do you look, I reply to people, I look like Bukowski inside and outside. Ugly and brilliant!

And don't try!

Footnotes:

[1] Take Me Home, Country Roads, Song by John Denver ‧ 1971

Image source: https://www.amazon.com.au/Post-Office-Charles-Bukowski/dp/0876850875