In Contemplation of Youthful Yawning

When I was a young boy, I was taught what was proper and what was improper, what was decent and what was indecent, what was good and what was evil. I was taught all the codes of conduct, the manners and mannerisms, the morals I was expected to uphold and display. All the variations in the vast expanse of “public decency” were taught to me with patient and determined endeavour on the part of my parents. No stone was left unturned. All the methods that could have been tried, were tried, and it resulted in a boy who, no matter what his other faults, had impeccable manners. For a while, at least.

Adulthood brought the inevitable deviation from the expected norm, the distancing of the man from his childhood self, a self rebellion of sorts. In many a way, as is usually the case, the teenage years marked the seismic shift from the quiet, shy boy to the boisterous, overconfident, belligerent young man. But no matter how much one changes, one can never (and this is one of those rare cases where there are no exceptions) escape from the effects of one’s upbringing. I am no different. Looking back with an objective eye, I can see clearly all the effects that are still in me, residual or dominant, that to this day dictate my actions and reactions to living experience. Even my widest “Deviations” or “Rebellions” from the path that had been set out for me can be viewed as the direct reaction of my mind against walking a predestined path without having any say in it. In some cases it was merely rebellion for rebellion’s sake.

But the problem is, so many of these issues are ingrained so early, that they lose all significance in the conscious mind and merely fester and grow roots in that dreaded underworld of the mind, the subconscious. Even someone as self obsessed and someone as prone to self examination as myself took 23 years to realize that a lot of the tinted windows that I viewed the world through had not been put there by me but by the creators of me. I speak not only of my biological creators but everyone who ever influenced or moulded my brain in any particular way. And in this context, authors of a distant past must share the blame equally if not more than those who are my kin.

Coming back to my childhood and methods used to teach me manners, I had been taught quite early on that it is rude to yawn in public. One must always cover one’s mouth if a yawn can’t be stifled. Fair enough. But as kids will be kids, a mere dictat is rarely enough for them to obey it. There needs to be a justification. The one given to me was a religious one. “If you yawn without covering your mouth, Satan will enter through your mouth and make you have evil thoughts.” It was a simple explanation, a terrific one that my childish, yet imaginative mind clasped onto instantly. I immediately began viewing Satan as this sneaky voyeur who just waited around for you to leave your mouth open unprotected and snuck in and perverted your mind. I immediately resolved never to allow him the chance. So, you could say the explanation served its purpose, a child now consciously avoided something that is considered improper. And you would be right in saying this, had the thought ended just there.

But one of the greatest tragedies of human education is that the educator rarely realizes what impact his words are having or in what manner it is impacting the pupil. The educator can do everything right, yet the innate disposition of the pupil will determine whether the message is received in the manner intended or taken in a wholly different manner altogether. My mother gave me a straighforward answer, invoking God and Satan and my fear of both of them to prevent me from doing something that was frowned upon. It was impossible to explain to me at that age the importance of public decorum and man’s responsibility as a public citizen. Even today I struggle to understand much of what is expected of me by society. A six year old version of me stood no chance. But the explanation had an effect no one could have foreseen.

Yawns were now intimately associated with evil thoughts in my mind. Once I yawned for about half a second before my hand leaped to cover my mouth. My mind went into a fear fuelled overdrive. When you are desperately trying to avoid thinking about something, your mind will ensure that that is all you can think about. I was fearful that my half second delay had let Satan into me, did this mean I would think evil thoughts? Right on cue, all that constituted evil in a six year old’s brain began flashing in front of my eyes like a powerpoint presentation. Where before I would have yawned a huge yawn five seconds long without the least consideration towards how it affected my train of thought, I was now engaged in an unwinnable battle with my brain to rid itself of the thoughts Satan brought into it. Of course, at the time I attributed this to Satan him(or her)self, not to the human brain’s often vindictive behaviour.

It took almost two decades for this behaviour trait ingrained deep in my childhood to surface once again in conscious light. Last week I yawned, and being much more comfortable with obnoxious behaviour as an adult than I was as a child, I did not bother to cover my mouth. If society did not like the look of my innards then they could look elsewhere. But almost immediately my mind filled with a train of thought whose perversity shocked even myself. “Where did that come from,” I wondered at myself. And then it hit me, that childhood story had never left me. I had long since given up any fear of, or indeed belief in Satan, but the reaction to yawning without covering my mouth, that never left me. Eighteen years later, my mind still clung to the belief that an unabashed yawn brought evil into one’s mind. I wonder now, what is a bigger crime. Yawning in public, or having to deal with the guilt of thinking uncharacteristically perverse thoughts every time one yawned for eighteen years. Which one made one feel more unclean, more unworthy?

The contrast between the innocence and the simplicity of the explanation offered to me as a child and the adverse psychological effect it had on me, made me ponder the topic in depth and at great length. And eventually my mind moved on to generalities. Who decided what was good and what was evil? Public welfare is generally considered to be the standard, but is there any such thing? Is there anything that can ever be equally good for everyone? Does every good for someone not have a flipside for someone else?

And, as a logical counterpart to the above questions, came the question of who decided what evil was. A lot of what seemed to be considered evil today seemed ridiculous to me. And the standards kept changing arbitrarily, usually decided by the dominant religion or culture of the area, only giving me further proof that there was no innate ideal goodness or evilness, just our conception of it. Very well then, if that were the case, why would man go through the trouble of creating these concepts at all? What was the way of mankind before these concepts came into existence?

The way was simple and pure. The will to power.

Before good and evil existed as concepts, before man had progressed (or regressed depending how you look at it) as far as that, the simple factor that decided each action was the strength of the perpetrator in relation to the subject of the action. Whoever was stronger, decided the course of events using his strength, and the sole aim was the propagation of his species. Survival of the fittest in the truest and purest form. Even in the primeval civilizations, the strongest of the tribe, clan, group or gathering always claimed the best shelter, the best females, the lion’s share of the food for himself. He did not bother to think of the handicapped child who was not getting enough to eat, it was none of his concern. He was the best of the species and his responsibility was to protect and enhance his genes. The other’s must take care of themselves or die in the process.

But then came the big upheaval. Ironically, it was with the arrival of “reason” that this most unreasonable of errors was introduced permanently into human civilization. The concept of equality, the concept of charity, the concept of goodness were introduced. How else were a mediocre mass of people to control the exceptional individual? It is no coincidence that most of what constitutes “good” in all of today’s leading moralities is the controlling of one’s urges or refraining from indulging in one’s pleasures. It has its origins in a concept that had been devised to prevent the strong from exercising their strength. Of course, no human dictats would have been adhered to, the Gods must necessarily be invoked. And thus, Gods that were previously viewed as distant, intangible, indecipherable beings that were distant and uninterested and merely existed and caused all to exist, suddenly transformed into Gods who were minutely interested in every single action of every single person and dealt swift and harsh retribution whenever man fell out of line. God took on the role of a moralizer and man (even the best of whom is regularly fallible) was now subjected to a constant torrent of inner guilt. It proved an efficient deterrent, and one of incredible cunning.

Mankind today exists in an unceasing, unrelenting state of continuous self loathing. The noblest of men, the purest of heart, even they have moments in their past that they are secretly ashamed of. Even if it never comes to be acted upon, a single unseemly thought can haunt a mind for years if not for a lifetime. And herein lay the double masterstroke of the masses.

Firstly, the greater the scope of a man’s actions, the greater his potential for guilt. A man who never did anything of significance in his life probably would not have much on his conscience either.

Secondly, the state of self loathing was one already common to the layman. It is natural for the inferior to feel chagrin at his inferiority. The great, however, were not used to such considerations. They were unused to guilt. And now they found it shackled to their every deed. The concept of evil was tailor made to fit the deeds of the strong that the weak could not hope to match or perform. And by contrast, every act of mediocrity became exalted as the good. Thus in time pride, once considered the noblest of emotions, is now considered a vice while humility, once viewed as a manifestation of cowardice, is now hailed as a great virtue.

Religion fine-tuned itself, perfected its methods, absorbed human psychology and historical knowledge into itself and has today become the most ruthless, efficient means of killing an individual and creating a pliant, submissive cog. Wherever one finds disrespect of geniuses, one will not have to look very far to find religion.

All this I gained from reflecting on a yawn in my childhood.

Only this and nothing more.

Shakespeare and his Relevance Today

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
                                                                                   - Sonnet 55, Shakespeare


Shakespeare and his Relevance Today

The release of the Vishal Bhardwaj movie, Haider(2014), brought back into the spotlight a fact that has been well documented. Shakespeare, plying his craft over four centuries ago, still retains the ability to fling universal truths at us no matter how much time has passed. Thematically, he hit pretty much every subject that stays constant in human intraspecies communications. Love, greed, ambition, revenge, lust. One can safely assume that these qualities or weaknesses are and will remain innate in humans as long as they exist.

 But if that were the only reason for Shakespeare’s timelessness, then we would have a much larger list of timeless authors to discuss today. These themes, after all, are hardly exclusive to Shakespeare.  But where Shakespeare’s work stands head and shoulders above the rest is its ability to evolve, to morph, to transmute, to create for itself a new meaning in every subsequent generation and yet to suffer no damage or perversion to its origin.

Haider is the perfect example to demonstrate this. Vishal Bhardwaj deserves great credit for pulling off such a challenging endeavor; however the fact remains that he was able to place the play (Hamlet) in contemporary Kashmir and address all the issues that ravage the modern Kashmir, while still remaining largely true to the original play by Shakespeare. While the director’s effort was no mean feat, that of the writer’s is almost criminally exceptional.

The characters in the movie have been created with great care and obviously after a lot of research and input from some insightful locals. Anyone who has stayed in Kashmir for an extended period of time would easily recognize most of them.

 The son who starts out with innocence, but is seduced into a life of violence by propaganda and perversions of truth by one and all around him. The mother who, desperate to prevent her son from straying too far, threatens him ironically with more violence (to herself), thus entering herself into the vicious circle of morbidity that life over there constitutes; the over protective older brother, the stubborn, slightly spoilt antics of the younger daughter, the political intrigues of Kay Kay Menon on his path to power, even the morbid humor of the gravediggers.

Each of these characters will resonate with a Kashmiri, or someone familiar with Kashmiris. And yet, take a step back and each of them is still very much a character from Hamlet.

This is what Shakespeare offers us that probably no other writer can. He did not scribble out vague general characters that may or may not be identified with, depending on your perception of it. He created characters that were complex, complete, intricate and most importantly, they were flawed. Perfect characters can exist only in literature, flawed characters come bursting into real life, and that is where its relevance is really measured.

He had the ability to look inside the mind of Hamlet, to perceive the turmoil that must have taken place when he beheld his mother wedded to his uncle not very long after his father’s death under circumstances that were suspect at best. Add to that all the political intrigues that take place around him and his conduct throughout the play is almost completely justified. Hamlet’s behavior is erratic, at times lunatic, but that is precisely what makes us identify with him. Under such duress, very few minds, let alone one as emotional as Hamlet’s (or Haider’s) would be expected to bear themselves with equanimity.

He had the understanding of human psychology deep enough to understand that a person engaged in an occupation such as grave digging, with his constant exposure to death and the oftentimes horrific stories behind it, would necessarily resort to black and morbid humor as a coping mechanism. And he also gives them their fair share of wisdom, for those who see the darker sides of life often have fewer veils before their eyes in their perception of it.

 The conduct of Gertrude may be seen as simply the wish for stability. The King had died, the enemies of the state were conniving and contriving to attack, the whole country was in a state of unrest. Her marriage to Claudius, whether regarded as incestuous or not, was at the very least an attempt to restore some form of stability to her life that had undergone massive upheaval. And that wish for a stable home is still as cherished a dream for most homemaker’s today as it was in the early 1600’s.

And, importantly, his understanding ran so deep as to have developed the whole story of Hamlet along the lines of the Oedipus Complex which, of course was not discovered until much later (Freud 1910). The procrastination in the murder of Claudius is an eerie precursor to the subsequent theory of Oedipus complex under which Claudius has carried out the actions which Hamlet himself subconsciously wanted to carry out (i.e. killing the father and having relations with the mother). It is to the eternal credit of Shakespeare’s writing that the dynamic between Hamlet and Gertrude remains potent and original even in the wake of such seismic shifts in the understanding of the human mind.

Each of the characters described above are from the original play, and yet, as shown by Haider, they hold true and are easily recognizable in today’s society.

Governmental intrigues, the mentality of oppressed masses, the mental state of an emotional soul whose life is riddled by betrayals, the undying emotion of two souls in love, the amoralistic ambition of a man who lusts only for power, all these characters have been explored to unprecedented depths by arguably the greatest writer in the English Language. And their continued relevance today makes one wonder whether humans have evolved at all or remain the same bestial caveman underneath while donning a more sophisticated exterior.

That could be a part of the answer, but nevertheless the skill of the author in creating timeless characters, not once but over and over, of exploring themes that encompass all of human existence, of establishing moral precedents and cultural trends for centuries to come, and (an often underestimated fact) to do so while also entertaining the contemporaneous crowds is a feat that must not, and thankfully is not underestimated.

Any observer of the film or theater culture today will be aware of the difficulty of creating a movie that appeals to the masses without sacrificing any of its artistic integrity. There appears to be a choice that necessarily needs to be made. Either make a movie of artistic merit OR make one to please the masses. Shakespeare holds the distinction of changing that “OR” into an “AND”.

And that too, is a big reason why his plays and poetry are still prescribed in every course and enjoyed by all students of literature. Somehow he has managed to retain the entertainment value of his plays while creating works that bear no comparison. The staging of a Shakespeare play (or a movie based on his play) is as much a successful commercial venture today as it was in his time.

And so we have the necessary ingredients. Eternal themes, impeccable command of language, deep, almost omniscient insight into the human psyche, shrewd discernment of interpersonal relationships and the related dynamics, vivid and lofty imagination, tinged with a realistic, often morbid take on life. Put all these together and you have a writer whose works not only survive, but grow in importance as the years roll on. Put all these together and you can make yourself another Shakespeare.

Until that time, we may return joyfully to the Bard of Avon. 

Peace and its Follies

How shall I find the help I need?
Shall here a thousand volumes teach me only
That men, self tortured, everywhere must bleed
And here and there one happy man sits lonely?
                                                                               - Goethe


Peace and its Follies

World Peace. It rolls off the tongue nicely. Celebrities, politicians, in fact, public figures of any kind have bandied this phrase about so much that it has rendered it meaningless, valueless. But let us not judge the term by the perversion it has undergone. Let us go back to the basics and examine the concept as it was in its original state.

Is World Peace attainable? And if so, is that necessarily a good thing?

Let us begin by addressing the first question.

World Peace is put forward as a utopia. A world where every human being gets along and prospers without harming his fellow human being. Where one can attain greatness without leaving the other in the dust, where all of mankind walks hand in hand from glory to glory. This, then, is the goal. Very well, how are we to go about it.

Race, gender, nationality, physicality, sexuality, cultural hegemony, historical prejudice, religion, culture and economics. These are just a few terms that can be named off the top of one’s head when considering just how many things divide mankind. Can all of these be overcome? The problem we face today is, we see these issues as individual issues needing individual solutions, or at best, problems that are interrelated. No one sees these issues as a single tree that has branched out from a single overwhelming factor. Evolution.

A certain Charles Darwin put forth a certain theory that subsequently went on to be proven. Darwin himself must not have imagined how vast the scope of his theory was. What the “survival of the fittest” means, what the existence of the survival instinct means is that every creature, given the chance to help its own cause, even at the cost of the other, will act to help itself or its kind survive. This is an animal instinct, and humans like to believe they have risen above it, but it is prevalent, if not dominant, throughout mankind. Fierce education mingled with fierce determination of will has produced exceptions. We have all heard stories of selfless sacrifice, if there is such a thing. However, the fact remains, the vast majority of mankind, or any other species on earth, has no qualms going to any extent to get a headstart in the rat race that is survival.

Now, seen through this light, one begins to perceive all the above mentioned terms of differentiation as mere tools. The British used “The mission of civilizing a Barbarian country” as a tool to drain India of its wealth of resources. We were called barbarians, and we believed it. And we merrily played along while they stole out the backdoor carrying our treasure. The white man called the black man a lower form of human being, and united the Western world in this belief, until a whole continent of people were enslaved. Hitler used the Jewish Race as the scapegoat to unite Germany in retaliation to French excesses. America used Islamophobia to justify attacks on Arabian countries.

Everywhere, every propaganda, every justification is a thinly veiled attempt at superiority, or a desperate cry for survival. Humans have it ingrained in them to step on corpses on the way to progress. No civilization in all of mankind’s history has prospered without having terrific violence in its past. It is, simply, the way it is.

Let us assume for arguments sake (though we would be wrong) that the survival of the fittest was not the root cause. Let us take each of the terms of differentiation as a problem in its own right, interlinked with the other problems intricately, but a separate entity nonetheless. Even so, can such a plethora of differences ever be overcome? When, in the same country (ironically enough, a democratic country), there can exist a journalist who doesn’t blink twice before flinging insult in the face of a religious figurehead in the name of freedom of speech, and an extremist who believes any insult to his religion is justification enough to carry out an act of terrorism; which naïve creature could even hope that peace could prevail even for a little while on a global scale?

There can never be a solution to man’s fear of the unknown. And the world is too large, mankind too diverse, for differences not to exist. Education proves inadequate to fight the instinctual reaction of man to shun or destroy that which seems foreign to himself rather than insquisitively learn about it before he judges it. Man will remain a man, and violence will remain an integral part of him.

"Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty – this is my proposition; the ‘wild beast’ has not been laid to rest at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has merely become – deified." – Friedrich Nietzsche



Now to address the second question. Is World Peace a good thing?

The first answer to come to one’s mind would be, “Yes, obviously.”

But the first thing that comes to one’s mind usually does not have a lot of thought behind it.

Friedrich Nietzsche postulated that war, conflict, dissent, dissatisfaction, revolt, revolution and cruelty were all necessary cogs in the machinations of human progress. It is almost a form of purgation in the Aristotelian manner that he professes works to the good of mankind. If one glances through history ( a worthwhile endeavor) one will find that the greatest leaps that man has made progress wise have come from times of tumult and warfare. The might of American Space programs relies heavily on Nazi science. The slavery question prompted concerted research into human psychology and race to investigate if one is really inferior to the other or is merely believed to be so. The oppression of Germany by France through the Treaty of Versailles ended up providing the impetus for uniting the whole of Bavaria with such an excess of fervor that they held the rest of Europe in a tyrannical grip of terror for almost a decade. Mankind has a wonderful habit of blooming to its full potential when under duress. And Nietzsche’s argument is that for this very reason, evil is needed, if only to spur the good on to greater heights.

A world at peace would have stagnated. There would be hesitations before every step forward. Everytime progress could be made, it would be weighed against its possible side effects and collateral damage and ultimately given up. That the whole species of man will advance in unison is a vain dream with no attachment to reality. In the real world, you always need a pioneer to light the way before the rest of the masses follow. But right there comes a divide. The pioneer’s task is the toughest, must his reward also not be correspondingly the greatest? If yes, then he is at a position more elevated than the rest, which distorts equality, and there can be no peace without equality. And if no, then we fall back into Karl Marx’s argument, and a simple google search will give you the disastrous consequences that any attempt at large scale Marxism has brought upon mankind.

Incidentally, in case the above remark misleads you into believing this article is pro-democracy, the very concept of democracy itself is flawed. And in the context of equality, this becomes all the more dangerous. In a democracy, all men are proclaimed equal, right at the outset, this leads us to a contradiction. According to the “logic” of democracy, the opinion of an educated, trained professor of Economics and of an uneducated, ignorant old villager carry the same weightage when deciding who is to be elected Finance minister. Democracy treats people as equals, when they are not. This results either in oppression of the masses or of oppression of the intellect. And none of the scenarios are pleasant ones.

This same thinking overflows into the wishful concept of World Peace. As mentioned before, peace cannot exist until there is complete equality in mankind. A man, seeing another above him, will necessarily wish to rise to his level rather than remain below. It is only natural, only fair, and indeed this aspiration is the reason we have advanced so far from our caveman days. But aspiration is a short step away from ambition and ambition can be squarely blamed for 80% of our world’s issues today.

These arguments do not even delve into the practical consequences of world peace. How is one to control overpopulation? How is one to control the already overaccelerated usage of our resources. And most importantly, what will then provide the impetus for humans to move forward?

The choice, in the end seems to be this. Peace at the cost of progress, resulting in stagnation, or progress while accepting collateral damage as a necessary cost that must be paid. The delicate task of mankind is to keep alive its repugnance for barbarianism while recognizing and accepting that barbarianism is still and always will be an integral part of the human psyche.



In conclusion, Peace is a noble objective to keep before oneself, but it is an erroneous one. To revert back to Nietzsche, “Life is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

This, seen objectively, is what life constitutes. The choice of accepting it or spending one’s life fighting against it, remains a personal one.

Idle Time

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Contempt

How fleeting this world to me
How insignificant its ambition
How vain its proud flattery
Of heaven and damnation

I blink and you have passed
From glory into nothingness
Your race is run, your die cast
Only I remain, nothing else

I exist, like the Cosmos, from the very start
I witness events both glorious and infernal
In the chaotic melodies I embed my heart
And give my love to all that is eternal

You put your faith in a collective lie
You exist, you suffer, and then you die
Tell me, mortal, what need have I
My contempt for you to justify?

Adieu

The Earth's poles may make a handsome pair
But they're destined for separation from the start
Their unity results only in widespread despair
Harmony exists only when they're apart

God, Fate, Nature, all to me seem to say
Your story will end in naught but tears
For I am the night, and you the day
We are opposing hemispheres

Let us attain the heights that we can
Let us on our individual lives embark
Let us remember this day, when we began
Our orbit, albeit in separate arcs

I cannot be altered, this alone I must be
And I would never wish for you to change
I have my wings too, let me fly free
I must find mine, and you your range

Onwards, my friend, scale your peaks
And know that I'll always pray for you;
To you not my brain, but my heart speaks
And with these words, it bids thee a fond adieu

Waiting for Lethe

As I lay stricken, the evening sun streamed through the window, the only source of light in my swiftly darkening room. The light fell upon a pile of dirty clothes. Nature itself was bent on showing me my ineptitude, it seemed.

I glanced around in the gloom. I could see the layers of dust lying on my bookshelf, proof of weeks of neglect. My books, my most worthy possessions, even they were not exempt from my neglect, from my laziness. If I could not find time for even them, what purpose did I serve by living? I had no friends. I was not made for friendship. And those few that possessed the tolerance to cure me of my solitude, I had successfully managed to repel and repulse with my impossible expectations. I constantly demanded perfection of them while maintaining that I owed them nothing in return. It was only now -    lying crippled as I was with no hope of recovery – that I realized that I did not want friends. Indeed, quite the opposite. I wanted mirrors. Everywhere I sought after what I already had within myself. I wished to see myself reflected back to me. And those that did it best, I called my friends.

Tell me, is there any purer form of self love?

I snorted in disgust at myself. There is no easier way to change a stubborn man’s opinion than to place him on his own deathbed and to leave him in solitary contemplation. The death bed is a curious entity. It somehow encapsulates both a space and a fragment of time. Once in that capsule, no matter how pliant or rigid his beliefs heretofore, the death bed renders man’s mind a clean slate. Every single value he has held as worthy will come under the most severe scrutiny in his final moments. It is no surprise that man oft wishes for a swift and unexpected death. It is not, as is commonly believed, because man is afraid of the pain he will face. Oh, no, no. Mankind has a much higher tolerance for pain than he himself wants to believe. But it is this questioning of beliefs that he wants to avoid. Every man subconsciously knows that he cannot be one hundred percent sure of the righteousness of his beliefs. He may have stood sturdy as a pillar, immovable in his faith in that ideal, but in those final moments, he cannot help but think, “What if I am wrong?” All activities he carries out before his death are a desperate attempt to conceal this doubt.

Well, this phenomena happens to the best of men. What chance did I stand?

Every noble cause I had propagated, every high morality I had preached, seemed hollow and superficial to me now. Only one prospect loomed large, towering over every other concept, dwarfing every other thought in profundity, whether physical or metaphysical. The prospect of final annihilation.

When man travels along the edge of the precipice of the abyss, when he sees nothing before him but a vast, unconquerable, insurmountable, impenetrable darkness -  when he is struck by the knowledge that he will inevitably topple over and descend into that horrific unknown  - how is he expected not to spend every moment preceding that in mortal dread of exactly that occurrence? It is the greatest feat of our subconscious that we are allowed to live our lives more or less ignorant of the magnitude of the fear that really resides within all of us. But at the very end of the journey, just when we need it the most, our subconscious gives way. It succumbs to the overpowering torrent of fear that reawakens at the sight of the abyss. And the torrent, building in pressure over a whole lifetime, sweeps all other emotions before it and deposits them unceremoniously into the dark recesses of our mind. They become the flotsam and jetsam of the mind, the unwanted residue that takes up space and pollutes the waters. Our mind is working overtime at this point, trying to fathom what it cannot. Trying to grasp what is not tangible. A person is the wisest he has ever been right before he dies.

Such was my state. Even as the final rays of the sun flickered out and my room was shrouded in darkness, I felt a chill creep up my spine. I stared at the dark shadow of the door, half expecting to see Death walk in through the gloom. I was ready, that’s for sure, as ready as I would ever be. I had stagnated, and I counted myself amongst the lucky one’s who did not have to see themselves degenerate into mediocrity, but who would perish pretty much at their peak.

However, my mind refused to lie still. It sensed, just as I did, that its time was up. But it did not choose the path of “dignified repose” as I had often dreamt it would during my morbid musings about my own end. On the contrary, it seemed determined to cram in a lifetime of thinking within these last few moments.

It flitted instantaneously back to my childhood, my incredibly pampered upbringing. It dragged from the dregs of my memory the image of the young, innocent, scared little boy whose whole universe was his family and who neither dreamt nor wished to dream of anything outside the realm of his relatives. Those same relatives who today did not know of his whereabouts or his state. The same family that had become estranged and had not spoken or indeed attempted to speak to him in years.

It highlighted, much to my discomfort, the irony that it was my own family that had pushed me to grow wings of my own. Where I would have been happy to lie safe in the nest for the rest of my life, my parents and siblings decided that it would not do, I needed to grow up, I needed to be responsible, I needed to be a man. Well, once shunted down that path, I can at least say to my credit that the job was well done. Too well done, it seems. Now, at the end, I look back and find no one to weep for me.

In the words of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein:
The path to my departure is free. There are none to lament my annihilation.

 Glorious independence indeed!

Night has fallen, and still I wait,
I wait patiently for Death,
For the waters of Lethe to satiate
My heart, to let my brain forget
The woeful tale that life narrates
From birth until my dying breath

As the darkness grew absolute and I seemed to exist in nothingness, my mind took the opportunity to jump to more profound topics. What, for instance, is the best way to go about life? Should one be fearless, Hedonistic, Hellenistic, Moralistic, Amoralistic, Nihilistic or – and I shuddered at the prospect -  is ignorance the path to a happy life? What if the philosopher on the ivory tower, searching the skies for any hint of treasures, misses out precisely because his eyes are turned upwards? Those lowlies whose eyes, and indeed whose beings are forever in the filth, may one day while frolicking about happen upon the treasure that lay concealed beneath the filth.

I chided myself for allowing my mind to wander into such dangerous areas. This line of thought threatened to invert my whole sphere of existence. And normally I used to place myself at the head of the sphere, at the top. If I were wrong, and if it were in fact inverted, then that would mean…

No. It would not do to think this way.

What was the time? How long had I been lying here? Why was I still living? Would Life wait till I had completely exhausted every possible outcome of every possible question before it finally left me? Is that what Death is, the exhaustion of all possible thoughts from the human mind? Does that make reality solely dependent on the functioning of the collective consciousness?

What did these musings have to do with me? Nothing and everything, it seemed. The beauty of universal questions had struck me many times in my lifetime, however their downside was only just beginning to make itself known. Universal questions, as the name suggested, applied to everyone, but because of that very reason, also applied to no one. There was no way to make a universal question an individual one without perverting its meaning. And this close to the end, I had neither the patience nor the inclination to consider the fate of anyone else in existence but myself.

The dogs howl outside my window in a ferocious lament. They know what is coming as well as I, those wonderfully instinctive creatures! How my heart craves to howl with them, How I wish to give vent, to share my final thoughts with the world, so that I may leave some semblance of my existence in the memory of people. The frightful tower looms before me again, it seems doubled in size and menace. The prospect of my annihilation now took on a more terrifying form. It dawned on me that my solitude had allowed my every trace to be removed. I spoke to no one, and so no one would remember me. When I died, my death would be reported, recorded, investigated, dismissed, filed, classified and put away in a drawer. My whole life would be reduced to a label on a file that would never be opened again. In short, oblivion.

I weep. Breaking every promise I had made myself all my life, I weep. What is man’s will in the face of such unquestionable challenges? Some may possess the strength, though I personally doubt it, however I say without any shame whatsoever, that I have been reduced to a quivering mass of flesh. Death scares me. Oblivion scares me. Nothingness scares me. It seems to me that even the Biblical hell would be a relief to me now. At least I would exist! If not anyone else in the Universe, at least I would have myself to speak to, to feel for, to pity!

Bah! Look at me. The man who did not believe in God, who did not believe in the existence of a soul, here I lie, retching, vomiting, wishing for hell, fulfilling my own prophetic self comparisons to Faustus to a degree which I myself would never have expected.

The shadow of the door, lost long since to the darkness, suddenly becomes slightly discernible again. My eyes blink, doubtfully, searching through the dark to get its bearings. It is the door indeed. What can this mean?

A cock crows. Dawn is come!

As the light slowly fills the room, bringing to life one by one objects that I had bid farewell to for all eternity, my heart is overcome. It is overladen with horror, fear, misery and bitterness.

Dawn! A new day! Death had not arrived. Accursed wretch! To condemn me to another day of existence! What sins had I committed to warrant such a fate? Why must I be consigned to live and relive my whole life in my mind over and over again? Was one lifetime not enough?

As always, when a soul cried out in profound grief, the Gods remained silent.

I would have to live through another day. Another day of torment, lying in wait. Waiting for Lethe.