I am under the impression that everyone else is happier than I. Of course it is an absurdity, yet it has gathered force in my mind. Logic may say otherwise, but secretly, I nurse the myth.
I am back at St. John’s (stjohnscollege.edu) yet it does not make me happy; I don’t think it was supposed to. It was somewhat easy to say, “I’m going back to something that I know.” But I haven’t returned to something that I know. Everyone is gone; everyone that I knew and mattered. The fantastic characters that formed the essence of the story. I couldn’t have written better characters.
“Where are you?” I sighed as I looked in the expected directions, hoping to find you there. What lofty and decadent thoughts were occupying your mind? What human edifice were you tearing down voraciously, stone by stone, reducing him to shivering humanity – to mediocrity.
Instead, I find emptiness; it’s too much for me to digest.
Now, I find myself contemplating throwing it all away; perhaps I was not meant to be a Johnnie. Was I? It’s said that the real Johnnies are the ones that leave. How much truth is there in this? I wish I were stronger. One is perfectly capable of living a life sans a degree; one need only look at all the poor people in the world. But is that the type of life I want? No, nor would I fall into that obscurity and mendicancy. No, no! I would not allow it … I was meant to do something, but what? Seriously, what was I meant to do? Nothing, that’s the problem!
In Seminar, the idea that everything was building up to Christianity gathered force. I cringed and I spoke. Are we so daft as to believe that there is a linear development, taking us from the Prime Mover to Yaweh to Christ? At heart I love the philosophers and see Christianity as a relapse into mysticism. It is a new dark age.
A hurricane ravages a city and we hear of how this is God’s punishment for laziness, for decadence … for degeneracy. But haven’t we heard this all before, haven’t we been eternally moving away from the purported perfection and innocence of mankind since the dawn of time and history? The human story is marked by decadence; I ask, how deep is this chasm? for I suspect, we ought to have hit the bottom a few centuries ago!
I thought these were things that were only to be heard in the Third World, where human minds are more prone to believe in such things. Alas, in America, we too speak in this fastidious language. How silly it is of us to believe we are any different from those poor beasts that subsist on less than $2 a day!
Perhaps, when San Francisco is destroyed by the next ‘big one’, I will cry but my grief and pain will become stronger at the point of distress if anyone dares to suggest that Sodom and Gomorrah have anew fallen at the hands of God.
I suspect I was put out much too early, made to struggle with life before I was physically and mentally able to put up resistance. Mark (ipioneer.typepad.com) says that I am not as naïf and innocence as everyone takes me to be. Am I evil then? am I to believe once again that I am the Antichrist? Oh, am I now to believe that I am decadent and worldly? Or should I say, accept it with a smile on my face, for what is better than to rejoice in truth!
And I have dug myself into a mess. I might just throw down the towel and give up. After all, does it really matter?
Perhaps I will not be happy until I am doing what I want. Why am I in college? It’s not something that I am doing for myself. Harsh, but where have we learnt the bulk of our knowledge? It seems to be a necessary duty. But what do I owe society?
In the end, happiness is the raison d’être. And I do wish to be happy.
Oh Muses, had ye made me be musical! then I would truly be happy! Alas, I was meant to not understand this thing they call the arts! How rustic and conservative, and here I thought that I was some effete grécaillon. I’ll content myself with being divine in other areas. What choice have I?
As I crossed the town square, I saw a man beating a horse. He commanded it to move, but the horse would not budge, not one inch. No, here stood a grandiose sculpure of the Demiurge; his muscles though effaced by time and toil, shown through; vestiges of what once must have been a fantastic animal. His head tilted down as he received blow after blow. And the man would not stop, though the crowd begged him to. Such inhumanity, yet what are cries and whimpers compared to action; mere words! I would have done something, but I am a coward. What if he had turned his blows on me?
Perhaps the horse is in a better place; nowhere. Amen.