Twenty-nine

I had another dream last light.

I'm skeptical of people who claim that, when they’re dreaming, the dream seems real. I watch my dreams as a playwright watches his plays being performed. There’s always a character in the dream who represents me, but every character in the dream represents some aspect of me. They’re all creatures of my imagination.

This dream took place at a college, in the office of the dean. There are two people in the office: the dean, and a woman. 

The focus of the dream is on the woman.

I am bewildered. Where am I, or my representative, in this dream?

Is it the woman? There are aspects of myself that some men repress in themselves because they consider them feminine, but I'm not one of those men.

She is in the dean’s office because her younger brother, a student at the college, tried to kill himself and it is her responsibility, as his only living relative and legal guardian, to decide what will be done with him.

She is exasperated with him. Her brother is weak and emotional, while she has always been strong and practical. 

She decides to have him institutionalized, so he can no longer cause her trouble.

I realize I am her younger brother.

Twenty-eight

Freud said what we call the personality is merely a collection of neuroses. If a person could rid himself of all his illusions, he would no longer be what we call a person. Mystics know the self is the greatest illusion.

Everything we create is meant to protect us from knowing the world, and realizing we do not exist apart from it. Just as we build houses and wear clothes to protect ourselves from the world, so also do we create myths to protect ourselves from knowing the world. We create a world of our own to protect ourselves from knowing that we, and the world of which we are a part, are an illusion.

Twenty-seven

I’ve sometimes wondered whether love might be the last illusion I have to kill before I can die. But love is not an illusion. At least not what I call love. 

Love is one of those words, like god, that has a different meaning for every person who claims to believe in it. Most of the people who claim to believe in god don’t (Oh Lord, I do believe, they cry; help thou mine unbelief) because they’ve never experienced god. Those who claim god is love obviously never experienced love, either, or they wouldn’t confuse it with the mysterium tremendum, because there’s nothing mysterious about love. It’s the most natural of things. It takes great strength of will not to love, but most people find the strength.

Those who claim god is love have a love-shaped hole in their lives identical in size to Pascal’s god-shaped hole, and they’re looking for someone or something to fill it. They’re not looking for a lover, or someone to love, but a god: someone or something who can do for them what they can’t or won't do for themselves. Someone they can love, and who can love them, as they can’t or won't love themselves. Someone they can live for and, if necessary, die for, because they have nothing in their lives that makes them worth living. 

If our lives seem meaningless, it’s an illusion to see others as meaningful, so that we find our meaning in living for them. Either all lives have meaning, or none do.

Twenty-six

It no longer matters that I will never know the things I want to know, the things I think everyone ought to know. These things matter to me, but only to me; and I no longer matter to anyone, not even to me.

Twenty-five

I'm not ready to die yet. I still have things to learn, illusions to kill.

We always kill the things we love. She was the only woman I ever loved, and I was the only man she ever loved. I used to know that was wonderful. Now I know it was also terrible, because I am dead without her.

Twenty-four

Bad as it already is, it keeps getting worse. As darkness falls, I cry out Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani? But I call myself an atheist, so Mene, Mene, tekel upharsin would be more appropriate.

I’ve rid myself of the three weird sisters and Jennifer. I see less and less of Leonard, as well, though of course I can’t rid myself of him entirely. Nor can I rid myself entirely of Justin. That would be churlish, after all the effort he’s made to entertain me. But he’s run out of scientific subjects for us to discuss (or for him to research and then read his notes to me), so we’re now reduced to discussing the Greek financial crisis. I’m hoping he’ll eventually realize we have nothing more to discuss, and stop calling me.

I don’t want to talk to anyone, not even myself. I didn’t intend to write anything more in this diary, or journal, or whatever it is, and was going to delete it and myself. But I haven’t. I’ve felt this way before, many times, and changed my mind. I may again.   

Twenty-three

What I want to understand most is myself, but only because I’ve given up trying to understand others.

I question myself because I’ve learned it’s futile to question others. Most of them don’t ask the questions I do, so of course they don’t have the answers I seek.

I ask myself the questions we should all ask ourselves. I asked them of others not because I believed they had the right answers - their answers may be right for them, but they weren't right for me - but because I wanted to compare their answers to mine. But the few who did ask these questions didn’t ask them of themselves. They asked them only of others.