i hate to admit it, not because i've been here. i haven't stopped a war or saved a village or invented a cure for selfishness. the battles go on, children live in poverty, and the human being hasn't been improved, even if i have ideas how it could be.
trouble is, shifting one part of the anatomy alters all the rest. take away the reptile part of my brain and i'd sink into sloth and enjoyment. subject my brain to pleasing chemicals and i'd be nobody without my perversity. you could give me a million dollars and see what happens. i would welcome your experiment.
alas, i've always worried about money. somewhere back in my mind is an empty coffer, a waiting grave, a subdued love. all exploration in solitude hasn't brought me to the diamond mines of satisfaction, fulfillment, i keep yearning for the end of torment in an epiphany.
that's not to say i'm suffering. what preposterous statement it would be: he's drinking tea, he's just had crackers and cheese, playing games of self-elopement on the computer. i've the luxury of myself in expanding in comfort and dreaming. if i want a few extraordinary past lives, i can conjure them up and blame them for making this world sordid. or slide down a glacier like an ace.
all fulfillment comes from the imagination. i'd like to quote from 'the book of disquiet' by fernando pessoa, a Portuguese poet:
"Everything for us, is in our concept of the world. To modify our concept of the world is to modify the world for us, or simply the world, since it will never be , for us, anything but what it is for us. That inner justice we summon to write a fluent and beautiful page, the true reformation of enlivening our dead sensibility - these things are the truth, our truth, the only truth.
alas, the responsibility thrown on my sloping shoulders, half an inch of my actual height lost, while my feet have become a half-size larger, the burden too much for me. in my sleep last night murders occurred, sane people tried to escape in vain, the marauders had the advantage of guns and mobility. if even in my nightmares, i can't reform the world, save humankind from drowning in rubber tires and plastic bunnies, how could it do so here, fishing for the fluent and beautiful page?
just to remind myself how many have disappeared from my memory, i open the tattered address book. yes, him, her, them, the time and place. the only gift i have to give is my presence, and i guard it like an angel among devils. not very flattering is it?
