There are not many places we can walk without being afraid of something. It’s a dark, twisty road through a spooky forest, this life is. And hasn’t anybody ever tried to teach you that life is grim?
The sun is just a common hallucination. Those initiated into life’s grimness rarely see it. Tell me: what are we defined by, if not our hallucinations?
We are like turtles: our heads in our shells when the sun is shining and our heads out of our shells in the dead of night. Don’t you know that turtles see the sun when they have their heads tucked in? The sun, like all mysteries, exists on the inside canvases of our eyes. We cannot help but create art in our minds—we do it instinctively, and see it at night while we snore.
And how can we really tell that we’re not just dreaming all the time? It could be that the times we’re “dreaming” are just the times that we’re dreaming that we’re dreaming. Yes, that’s right, we’re dreaming all the time and we won’t know until one day when we wake up. And the day we wake up could be our death, isn’t that funny? For all we know, death could just be a shift in consciousness. In fact, many people believe just that.
And to step ever so briefly away from anthropocentrism: do other animals fall in love? Because perhaps the beasts’ tongues are 20,000 leagues deeper than we ever expected.
But moving on: if life is a dark place, and the sun is a hallucination, how do we bring true brightness into our minds? Is it through love? Is it through dreaming about love?
This could be our fourth or fifth or six hundred thousandth life. It could be that we just experience amnesia of our past life each time we die. Maybe we had to live a lot of simpler lives before we could become complex.
When we dream, we step through an intangible sensory world, bloomed into being by our marvelous, super-processing brains. We are computer brains, and we are sometimes whimpering dogs at the mercy of our computer brains. We are computers in clumsy, hairy bodies; we have bowels, bones, intestines—even breasts.
Violence seems to come to us naturally. If, as a species, we are a small child, then bloodshed is our pull-duck, following us everywhere, wobbling and grinning. It’s a vicious world: a kaleidoscope of murders all across the globe. Wouldn’t we feel a bit unnerved if we really did see a girl with kaleidoscope eyes?
People do funny things. In an epoch we don’t remember we were put in People Wheels. These days, hamsters are considerably tinier and less despotic.
And if there are times that glimmer, they are the moments when we speak of magic, and when we entertain, just for a brief second, the possibility that magic might really exist.
Of course, I'm no witch trial judge or voodoo man. I don’t really believe in magic.
I only want to point out that as we grow older, we spend less and less time entertaining wild possibilities. When we are young, it comes to us as naturally as suckling from our mother’s breast. And what good, nutritious milk it was, too!
These days—and it’s a pity to say it—what we eat is mostly strange chemicals. We live packed together in cities, in cells, on top of each other, with fire escape ladders that no one ever thinks to use. Instead of escaping, we pay the rent and keep on living on top of each other, day after day, with window shades by Ikea.
It bears repeating that people do funny things. They flock to their own prisons. And what is so bad about real prison, where you can just sit and have your thoughts to yourself all day? It might offer a person some time for self-reflection, and that’s more than a lot of people seem to have time for.
When we think of prisoners, we think of “bad people.” We think of people who sell crack and steal cars and have unexplained bags of human feet in their freezer. But we would do these things too, if we had been born with different genes and circumstances. We develop an awful lot of pride about random lucky things that we weren't in the least bit responsible for.
And will we learn to cultivate humility to Life and Fate? We can do this while still creating our own futures. After all, it’s not the easiest thing in the world, but most people can rub their tummies and pat their heads at the same time.
As a warning, like a green “Mr. Yuck” sticker on a bottle of Drain-O: we may be subjected to pain in this life. In fact, pain is completely inescapable. But remember when we would get hurt as children? Countless skinned knees from all our misadventures. We shrugged them off—ate them, practically, like a dog eats his own fleas.
Not that I think there's any point in idealizing childhood. Perhaps in shrugging off our wounds as children, we only drove them deeper into our psyches, so that they bubble up years later at precisely the wrong moments, like when we’re forty and have two kids and a dog and suddenly read Nietzsche and run off to Peru.
And what does it mean to quit on life?
I think it means to live without wonder.
