Choosing life

I think I've seen it quite often in the past few months; we shouldn't let emotions get the better of us, especially the bitter, acrimonious feelings that tend to turn people into sullen and petulant beings. We assume that all thoughts and actions emanate essentially from character and personality, but all too often forget that caustic and resentful sentiments and behaviour in turn have the insidious effect of corroding the bits of goodness in people, leaving behind what is acrid and acerbic, like something gone bad.

Two of the greatest tragedies occur when a person's expectations are incongruent with his abilities, or when the circumstances that life deals to him are incommensurate with the potential that nature has endowed him with. But the protagonist in either case need not be a tragic hero, like a Macbeth drawing arms against morality and destiny, nor like a Miltonian Satan falling further into a darkness not of the Deep but of his own creation. A person of real ability would take life into his hands, and not crush it, but shape it into a design of his own choosing.

These days

I think it's a mistake to accept life's banalities without discrimination or discernment, to let those prosaic insipidities accumulate like a descending mist of tiny, indivisible and irreducible errands, slowly filling up the bracket of each day, the hours devoured by the trite, the tedious and the trivial. Consciousness is a disposition too complex to be concerned with what is stale and vapid, and what takes over when consciousness melts away is the same insentient, obtuse oblivion that keeps the clouds afloat and gives worker ants their zest for labour.

Sometimes colour seems to drain from the world, especially in moments like these when the streets are filling up with rain and you can't tell the hour of the day by the shade of the sky, and time spends itself in the slow, steady count of one to twelve. I spend it on the piano, with a book, or in thought, during days like these when the world is washing out to sea in the rain. Thankfully there'll be no space for banalities in the next few months, because life has been too good for that: life, which we should speak of only in the present tense, and though we may wave to the past and at the future, we must remember to spend our time in the present doing more than waving. I also remember you, for life reminds me about you, and you remind me about living.

How shall a man be purple?

When Florus was deliberating whether he should go down to Nero's spectacles and also perform in them himself, Agrippinus said to him, "Go down": and when Florus asked Agrippinus, "Why do not you go down?" Agrippinus replied, "Because I do not even deliberate about the matter." For he who has once brought himself to deliberate about such matters, and to calculate the value of external things, comes very near to those who have forgotten their own character. For why do you ask me the question, whether death is preferable or life? I say "life." "Pain or pleasure?" I say "pleasure." But if I do not take a part in the tragic acting, I shall have my head struck off. Go then and take a part, but I will not. "Why?" Because you consider yourself to be only one thread of those which are in the tunic. Well then it was fitting for you to take care how you should be like the rest of men, just as the thread has no design to be anything superior to the other threads. But I wish to be purple, that small part which is bright, and makes all the rest appear graceful and beautiful. Why then do you tell me to make myself like the many? and if I do, how shall I still be purple?

- Epictetus: The Discourses, How a Man on every occasion can maintain his Proper Character

Today

Freedom is a word spelt in three letters, and fittingly enough, in capitals. The date had always been approaching, but in fits and starts, sometimes magnified out of proportion by occasional spells of euphoria or delusion, sometimes shrinking back into microscopic insignificance when seen across the vast distance and darkness of sleepless 50 km road marches. There is no need nor reason to sentimentalise the experience, because it swayed between banality and burnout, but letting these two years lapse without having taken notice of those odd moments worth remembering would have been a waste, for there were people worth appreciating and events worth reliving.

We are all in search of lost time; we are all looking for the threads that used to bind the most ineffable moments of our lives together, and what we cannot regain we have to wait for, and we wait in the hope that what we cannot find, someone we have yet to meet will return to us with smiles and kind words.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only..." - Charles Dickens

The Night Shadows

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is preferable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

- A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

Frozen air

He had been sitting in his room for too long, his thoughts and dreams hanging silently around him like balloons, some growing soft under the weight of the stillness and drooping in midair like overripe fruit, some already shrunken and shrivelled on the floor, when a sudden breeze pushed open the windows and batted at his kingdom of frozen air, releasing at once the turbidity of his life in a liberating rush that sent the balloons dancing across the room and out from the window, upward and outward at the invitation of the sky, a constellation of colour that vanished at last into the expanse of glowing blue, the disappearance of dreams looking for their own dimensions.