November 22, 2007
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You are never yourself when others are present. Even when alone, when others are in your mind, when you have in your head the thoughts and behavior of other people, you are not truly experiencing individual thought. When you observe your surroundings, late in the night, with no one around to disturb or invade your unsullied thoughts, you can feel and think as a person, and mystery fills the air. The gentle wind, the towering sky, all the motionless space, is around you, lighting the fire of an incredible distinction; I’m alive, and all this is not. What great comedy and profundity is this, that I am alone here, where I never expected to be, thinking to myself. With no one else present to prevent the authenticity of my thought, I am free to think what I truly think. What is all this, this dead matter around me that at least possesses a liveliness and face, unlike the barrenness of other planets, and I standing amidst it, alive, moving within it? Such wind across my face. Oh how unready my daily heart is to see what lies behind it all. How blurred the sight of my thoughts is, to know the force that is responsible for me finding myself here in this infinitely curious position. This sight, of nature merely waiting around, as a clock does tick, yet I am alive! When was I dull? When was I low in feeling? What day was it that I drudged through the muck in my mind? How unnecessary is my very self, and what rarity this ability to see and think is, and yet I have it! Perhaps seeing through my eyes is right now in all the universe the most peculiar thing occurring; could life be anything but troubling because of its inexplicable presentness despite its overwhelming rarity? Much is not alive; yet I am. Most people live lives based on the assumptions generated by large crowds expelling thoughts from their sights, and thus know not what it is to feel not only life, but its rarity as well, coursing through the body. I am alive, and I am not sure I will be able to recover from the fact.
In the stillness, my thoughts dwell, and I realize the only thing that life ever was. No matter what muffles life’s true nature, it can always be refound, in the empty spaces of nature, where the tranquility strips away the noise of falsity that suggest life is normal.
Somewhere in history, there has been someone whose life went unrecorded, but loved life vivaciously. The very thing it is, full of pain, relationships, and thoughts, all evaporating at death, is beautiful and tragic simultaneously. And this person would walk off alone, laughing to himself because he was alive at all, and off into the woods to know himself and the world he was in. On the ledge of a cliff he would stop and oversee the mystery of life, and feel it consume him, and know that it meant something, and was worth living. And though undocumented, I know somewhere this man lived and died. When I am lost in this mire, the deluge of unknowledge, I will return to the only and ultimate situation; the lonely presence of my thoughts.
