One Hundred and Seventy

But to say we’re more alike than we are different is, although not wrong, misleading.  Better to say we’re alike in being different, because everyone is unique. 

This seems paradoxical, which confirms it’s true.  The truth always seems paradoxical to fools, and we’re all foolish most of the time, pretending not to know what we know.

I’ve always asked myself why I stay alive, and usually answered it’s because I still want to understand.  The goal, said Marx, is not to understand the world, but to change it; but I've always known that in order to change the world, one must understand it - know both what it is, and what it could be; and understand ourselves as well - know what we can do to change it.  I’ve always known that I can do nothing alone, and I’ve always known I am alone; but I’ve never allowed myself to put these two facts together and draw the logical conclusion.

One Hundred and Sixty Nine

There’s no one and nothing left to live for.  We could go on living, and hoping we'll do better; but time and time again we’ve chosen to do worse.  And now our time is running out.  Even if we did miraculously change now, and did do better, it’s too late.

Is this true of us, or of me only?  I can’t separate myself from them. 

The last mystery of identity: they and I differ in that they imagine they and I are different, while I know we’re more alike than we are different. 

They imagine they can separate themselves from others, and save themselves by leaving the others behind.  I know I can’t because I never wanted to.  Until now.  And now that I wish I could, it’s too late to deceive myself, as they do. 

O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to deceive oursels as ithers deceive us!

One Hundred and Sixty Eight

I listened to Philip Glass’ Akhnaten on YouTube today.  I would have liked to have seen it performed, but it hasn’t been performed often enough to have been videotaped. 

People who walk out of a Glass performance obviously came knowing little or nothing about him.  One must come prepared to experience his music (one doesn’t enjoy Glass' music; one experiences it) because he doesn’t seek to entertain, to create a fantasy in which the audience can suspend their disbelief for an hour or two before returning to the real world.  He attempts to depict that aspect of the real world which most people most prefer to forget: what we called eternity, when we still understood that change is an illusion. 

Those who accuse Glass of being limited because there’s no progress, no development, in his music are missing the point.  His music is limited because Glass is a composer of and for our times, and we no longer believe in progress. That illusion has been dispelled, because the more we tried to change the more we remained the same - although most people don’t seem to know it, or don’t want to know it. 

Everyone’s accepted - most of us with resignation, but some with glee - that history is dead, and there's no alternative to the existing social order. Change is an illusion. They've heard that god is also dead, but for some reason many refuse to accept it.  Those who still create narratives with a beginning, a middle and an end do it for them.  The rest of us know there is no story - or if there is, it isn’t about us and our fantasies.  We come into the story, if that's what it is, in media res, play our part and leave with nothing resolved. 

Those who claim Glass is religious because gods figure so often in his narratives ignore the fact that those gods are museum artifacts or objects d’art for the discerning cultural tourist.  Glass is an antiquarian, and his minimalist music is a dead end, the aural equivalent of Beckett’s prose.

One Hundred and Sixty Seven

Sallust said few men want freedom; most only want just masters.  He was wrong.  Men tell themselves they want justice, personified in just masters; but what they really want is order.

Most men don’t care whether their masters behave in a way some philosopher defines as just.  They know justice is only a word.  Only fools and madmen debate what that word means, and what each of us would be entitled to in a just world.  In this world, those who have not yet been driven mad by their suffering and/or the suffering of others know might makes right, and we're entitled to whatever we can take and keep.  Most of us therefore want masters whose whims and lusts are orderly and predictable.

Some claim might makes right because we’re animals, like any other.  But animals in a state of nature are social, with a sense of right and wrong.  We’re antisocial animals, preying on each other and asserting what we call our free will by doing what common sense tells us is wrong.

We're trapped in a cage of our own making, which we call civilization; and we’ve gone mad, as all caged animals eventually do.  Now that we’ve accepted there’s no escape from this cage except by dying, we've decided to destroy ourselves.

One Hundred and Sixty Six

Being told you're going to die shouldn't be anticlimactic, but dying ten years from now isn't near enough to be alarming. Neither is it far enough to be easily ignored.

I was a bit glum, but mostly because on the way home from the doctor's office I drove through the old neighborhood. 

I'd driven though it for the first time in decades last summer, and was awed by its beauty. The uncut grass was knee high and the abandoned houses were barely visible, engulfed in greenery like ruined temples in a rainforest. Sunlight flickering through leafy tree branches overhead reminded me of stained glass windows in a cathedral. I thought it was the perfect place in which to die, and vowed to come back when I was ready to kill myself. But this time the grass had been cut, and the houses looked bleak as disinterred corpses. 

Saddest of all, a car was parked in front of one of the houses with its hood up, and a man was working on it. Someone's living in this graveyard.

One Hundred and Sixty Five

All my life I’ve dreamed of travelling.  Up north.  To the city.  To places I’ve never been except in imagination.  Anywhere but here, wherever ‘here’ happened to be.  I’ve never been at home anywhere except in my imagination.

All my life I’ve dreamed of losing my way.  But not in the forest, like Dante.  It’s in the city that I lose my way, and in buildings like the Tower of Babel or Vanity Fair.  I’ve always been at home in the forest, an animal among other animals.  In the city I get lost among the featherless bipeds, alone in the crowd.

I’ve always been alone.  We all are, but the others don’t seem to know it.  Don’t want to know it.

We can’t know each other, or ourselves, unless we know that we’re always alone with ourselves, with our own thoughts.

What do the others think?  Do they think?  To think is to be made aware of how we differ, if they’re our own thoughts.

Most people don’t think for themselves.  Not because they’re stupid, but because they don’t want to be alone.

Fear of being alone makes them think what they imagine are other people’s thoughts, which gives them the comforting feeling of belonging to the crowd.  But it’s an illusion.

Thinking they’re part of a crowd, all of whose members think the same, are the same, prevents us from knowing who we really are.  One is always alone in a crowd.

I still weep for them, even now, because lost though I am, they don’t even know they’re lost.