Twenty-five is a mathematically precise moment to stop and reflect on life and beliefs. I used to hide myself from the outside world, but now that I realize how insecure all people are than what they reveal, I begin to put my shield down. With genuineness and honesty comes peace and comfort, and I am unleashed from the chains that suppress my soul. May the following lines help others to love me, ridicule me, or manipulate me (jk, only love me). It doesn’t take two months until everything I write irritates me, but let the mind produce the mediocre work of now: it permits us to spot from a distant future the snapshot of our naive thoughts and desires.
Hypocrisy
I force myself to be authentic in my writing and immediately meet resistance. Even my private diary is surveilled by an invisible eye whose judgment hinders me from jotting my disagreeable thoughts down. But it is even more challenging for me to be honest in my daily interactions. If concealing the truth is an act of politeness or tactfulness, hail that, but often fear of false shame conducts my uprightness. I needlessly preserve my dignity, I bend the truth to save my face even when narrating an embarrassing story to my loving family member.
It is easy to be truthful when you decide which truth to tell as if you were choosing it from some catalog. By honesty, one should assume never hiding the truth, and the real challenge is to be honest despite painful consequences. Candor1 is the right word2.
Weakness of character shelters in the house of lies. Many reasons and pretexts can be brought in defense of one’s misdeed, of one’s late arrival or mediocre work, but only the truth which brings shame and disapproval of others should be spoken out. And the magnanimity of a man should be measured by his willingness to forego his reputation by his commitment to candor.
But what am I saying? Fish like to talk about flying. Reprobates gush about morality. The affluent rhapsodize discipline and determination. And I… I am a hypocrite who lies that he is a hypocrite. But I show mercy to myself by admitting it all.
There used to be a Sufi branch – The Malāmatiyya – who would conceal their positive traits and make their faults known. They were doing it to detach themselves from the materialistic world and get closer to god. The Malamatis would consistently humiliate their ego by never performing praiseworthy acts publicly. If you did good to someone, hide it. If you succeeded after hard work, hide it. If you performed a heroic act, hide it. But there should be a pious purpose behind this reticence, as everything else is merely an obscure imitation of the Malamatis.
Yet declaration of your mistake to the world usually hides behind the mask of progress, removes responsibility, and eases mental pressure. You tell others: “Look, I know and admit my flaws. Am I not wise?! Maybe I do nothing, yes, I don’t act beyond telling, but the regular demonstration of my wisdom should be worthy of admiration.”
Passion
The more time passes, the more I realize how bored people are all around. All these individual lives are the product of repetition, and even in their leisure, they can’t deflect ennui and sluggishness. After the routine of daily work, they arrange a meeting in a nice cafe in the city center, and their conversations which lack substance, instead of bringing relaxation, demand effort and are no more than temporary distraction. This lazy human attempt, in lieu of eluding boredom, intensifies it. With false hope or by their ignorance, people play board games, watch TV shows, attend random events, argue on meaningless topics, discuss politics, provoke aggression, engage in a fight, wage wars – all that just to “dodge the redundancy of time”.
What is escape? Passion, and its direct consequence – physical pain; humility born from understanding our finite insignificance in relation to infinite time. That is Brodsky’s answer. I don’t know what to make of it.
People want to live with passion and are chained by the shackles of daily responsibilities. They artificially put interest in their lives by engaging in countless activities: they read, write, listen to music, hike, mountainbike, skydive, ski, race, learn the tango or a musical instrument, travel to have numbers and stories to tell: “I have been to seventeen countries. We were robbed on our latest trip. We survived… I will describe a hyperbolic danger and tell nothing about my cowardice. What an adventure!”
Living with passion is something I am incapable of fully grasping and achieving. I have a blind spot somewhere, a malfunction that doesn’t allow me to live with full intensity. Do I recall any passionate act, decision, or goal that I committed myself to? I strain my memory, there is nothing to be found in the abyss of nostalgia. Maybe I should try again. Oh, wait, a rare event hesitatingly surfaces from my mind’s embrace.
I am bold and unwavering on that February day. I am consistent in my desire for sixteen hours and I act with unseen commitment. I amaze myself. Driven by passion, I break out of the boundaries of my capacity. It all ends well, I am lucky. I no longer doubt my courage.
I write these lines exactly three months later. I don’t know how to replicate that strange day. Living life guided with passion will usually usher stupidities, cause pain to ourselves and to our loved ones. Why would then one choose a passionate life over a life full of interesting activities? Only a selfish man who cannot properly define the word “passion” will aspire to live a passionate life.
I am half the man I used to be. I stopped overestimating the importance of books and great thinkers. My Brodsky List turned into an optional activity from a required burden. I now plainly recognize intensive reading and self-education as a distraction from life.
Greatness
I have passed the stage of utmost doubt and uncertainty. I occasionally stumble upon my thoughts in the paragraphs written by eminent minds, I find my habits in wonts of great men. And when I search for ways out of a dire strait, I am not afraid of miscalculation anymore. What changed me? A day, boring as it may be, pinches my emotions and thoughts with the claws of modest events or by their lack of, and day by day, unnoticeably, I react to accumulating trivialities until I wake up to see in the mirror an entirely disparate man.
I struggle with the concept of greatness. My vanity craves to live a life of the noblest passions and write a page in a history book. But my disposition opposes all the traits of a great man. My desires do not align with my nature.
Deep down in my heart, I know that the greatness of a man should not be measured by his sphere of influence. Are you a leader guiding the masses toward enlightenment? Good for you, you will misguide half of them into darkness. A man knows nothing and claims to know everything. Emersonian self-reliance feeds his esteem and inebriates him, his life finally attains a meaning and importance and he is revered by the blind mass. But more importantly, he always has a problem to solve, a brawl to fight, a danger to test his courage. With these games, he loses himself in the gush of external events and barres boredom from opening the door of his mind. He follows in the footsteps of Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon.
Then there is an inwardly directed man who lacks vanity. His attention is captured by his character and spiritual life, he aims not for fame but evolution of his thinking and senses. Similar to the outward man, he doesn’t have illusions or false expectations about life. His conscience is unstirred or hurt when we least expect it. He equally loves and hates people, or rather, he neither loves nor hates them. His indifference alienates him, and his seemingly unspectacular inward life, as perceived by an average observer, is nothing but boring. He is dissolved in his character, and maybe less fragile, but we should not naively assume that he is superior to the outward man. He follows in the footsteps of Montaigne, Tolstoy, Pessoa.
Who am I? An inward man full of vanity.
We never know self-realization.
We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.
Faith
There are three stages of faith.
The first stage is blind faith. A man wholeheartedly believes in the existence of god, hates those who go against his belief, and involuntary blasphemy which sporadically befalls into his timorous heart agitates his soul. This is usually the result of upbringing.
The second stage is denial of faith. A man begins to question his blind faith and his conscience is tormented by this incredulity. Science tells him that there is no evidence to prove the existence of god, and if logical thinking presses him continuously, his faith collapses and he starts to firmly deny god or call himself an agnostic without understanding the real meaning of the term. This is usually the result of scientific education.
The third stage is return to faith. A person struggles throughout his life, strives for worldly, empty goals. His ordinary dreams coincide with the dreams of thousands of other skeptics. He becomes dependent and attached to the world. Gradually, he drowns in the spiritual void of atheism, and if he is not asleep, he returns to faith as a means to escape this incessant suffering – nausea. This is sometimes the result of denial.
When a religious man uses the scientific method to prove the existence of god, he is flimsy and unpersuasive, and for that, he will be mocked. Faith shouldn’t succumb itself to reason. Yet when Remarque explains with his comrades the origin of the lost generation’s atheism, I can comprehend its sound roots: a man lives through the horrors of war, witnesses the cruelties of human nature, his soul is disturbed by the piercing unfairness of life, and as a consequence, his illusions about humanism vanishes, his faith in benevolent and forgiving god ceases away. That – I understand. But when a rational man, who has experienced life through books and science assuredly denies the existence of god based on logic and reason – I laugh at him. For me, it implies his misunderstanding of the concept of god and faith, his naiveness if he is young, and his narrow-mindedness if he is elderly.
Death
It is premature to judge a man’s life before his demise.3 But we will be lost in oblivion in any case. Even if I am to die a heroic death, I will be forgotten soon enough. If I am lucky, after a hundred years, my whole emotional and rational life experience will be reduced to the memory of a couple of deeds and character traits, as if I never was real and existed only in abstraction.
Summer grasses,
All that remains
Of soldiers’ dreams.4
How to deal with unlived life? How to test if I truly lived? If perchance I learned that today I will breathe my last, I wish to feel total indifference towards my own death. That indifference would emanate from understanding of a) that I did one thing truly worthwhile in my life, and b) that the world would be untouched by my death.
A year and a half ago, I edited my grandfather’s memoirs and brought unorganized writing into the form of a book. It was a several-month long process, and once I edited the last page and saw the result of my efforts in front of my eyes, I realized for the first time what living actually meant. It was neither variety and intensity of experience which I desperately was striving for all the time, nor success or admiration of others which are fleeting and unreliable, but a selfless act of completing a noble work that made my life meaningful.
On my last day in this world, I don’t want to declare my love to others and ask for forgiveness, for correctly conducted life would relieve me from this responsibility. Instead, I should do what is necessary at the moment: plant a tree that may never grow, deliver a scheduled lecture to ungrateful audience, write the lines of a poem which will remain unfinished, go for a morning jog to improve health which won’t be needed the next day, fix the bedroom lampshade which will go off forever. I do not want my last day to change my habitual behavior. And if I am to die today, I should finish this writing.
Footnotes
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Candor – the quality of being honest and telling the truth, especially about a difficult or embarrassing subject (Cambridge Dictionary). ↩
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A good deal of misunderstanding among people comes from attributing different shades of meaning to the same word, or not using the precise word due to the lack of vocabulary. Sometimes I feel like there exists only a unique combination of words to express my thoughts as efficiently and as accurately as possible. And even in that case, I doom myself to be misunderstood by the mass which neglects vocabulary. ↩
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Read Montaigne’s essay or The Life of Otho for elaboration. ↩
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There are different translations of this haiku by Bashō. ↩