Sixty-eight

I tell myself that I haven’t killed myself yet because I still want to understand. But what do I want to understand?

I want to understand the world. I also want to understand myself, because I am part of the world.

The world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Is this true?

Of course it’s true. I’m not a fool. Neither am I arrogant enough to assume that anyone who disagrees with me is a fool.

Neither am I foolish enough to assume the world is a better place than it seems to me, merely because other people seem to tolerate what to me seems intolerable,

It's not that they and I see the world differently. They see the same world I do. They tolerate it either because they don't care if others suffer so long as they don't, or because they see what I can’t.

They see something that reconciles them to the world’s pain, something they think gives meaning to what seems to me a meaningless battle of ignorant armies; and it gives them hope.  

I see no reason to hope. But is this because who and what I am blinds me to the truth?

When I was young, I thought I was going to change the world for the better. Others thought so, too. Were they and I wrong about me, or wrong about the world?

Am I arrogant enough to think that, if I couldn’t change the world, no one can?

I'm sure there are those who could do what I couldn’t, but I don’t see anyone who wants to.