March 23, 2013

• The sadness of the word ‘eventually’

  She was hurt and felt unknown so she said ‘I will go among other people, I will drown myself in new faces, new words, new feelings.’ So we she went to a club and fell in with a new crowd of people and did just that. She did forget all about him. And none of them knew that was why she was around them, and eventually she didn’t either. The causes of the world had disappeared.

  People write because it’s painful to not get what you want. 

  But I realized something recently. I realized it’s not just not getting what you want. It’s realizing, looking back, that you were never going to get what you want. That there’s a causal structure to the world that you couldn’t have predicted, that you had no idea about, and then you wanted something you could not get out of your naivete. You were blind and walking into a burning barn. We are not just sad we did not get what we wanted. We are sad that we are fools, condemned to live foolish lives, dreaming dreams that could never be.

   

  If our private self were actually public no one would be able to keep up with it. When we were brimming with joy they would see that, and then at night if we delved into an unassailable misery, they would see that too. The next day we would be brimming with hope again. People would be so confused, they would ask ‘why? why did it change so?’ but we would have no answer for them. We hardly know our own explanations; we just let what happens happen. It is undeniable that it is happening; it is us. We feel many things and adjust to the fact that the feeling is real. But others must understand, must know why you are changing. For them it is a question; the fact seems unreal until the question is answered. For us the question may come later or not at all.  It is a good thing that we can keep our life private, if only for the sake of seeming to make sense. Do I seem stable to you? Good, there is some hope to the tool of trickery. We may recover from that pit we fell into yet.

  
  

  I want the truth. I want to know the truth and to live in the truth. I know I will never know the truth. I want something I cannot have. Yet I define my life in relation to the desire and pursuit of it. I define my life by something I know I will not get. What can be said for this paradox? Anything? What should direct our desires? Just what we can get?

  
  

  You are tired; yet you must go on. We always imagine ourselves at our best. ‘Then people will see who I really am, what I’m really made of,’ we think.  But the time never comes when we are excellent. Eventually it’s the case that this is who you are. One of the externals we must deal with is never feeling up to it, never having everything be right, never being totally ready; we must be before we are ready. Who you are is by definition who you are before you are.  

  • 4:53 pm
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