Tehvitan Ibele

Flowers for Algernon

There is a moment in the novel when the protagonist watches himself through the window.  Several, I believe, but the one I remember perhaps speaks to the age at which I read it--that, my gender, or both.  Anyway.  He watches himself, wishing, hoping, willing that his consciousness will merge with his body so that he can physically experience what he sees.  He eventually manages to, but, if I remember correctly, the tragedy lies in the fact that this externalizing of the self is a metaphor for the separation of his heightened mental capacity and his animalistic desires, the latter of which is fulfilled (ironically) through exercise of the former.  So it goes.

This phenomenon occurs in our daily lives in the form of the surreal, sometimes brought on through alcohol, or more frequently for my species of student, lack of sleep and constant high stress environments.  It's the engine of routine--a Promethian punishment focused through the lens of mediocrity and, in my case, slight masochism.  Even the smallest shift, however, an attempt to wake from the repetitive nightmare, threatens to derail the beautifully constructed infinite loop.  What I experienced today, however, was different.  It was something, I contend, more valuable than happiness.  Of course, there is a decent possibility that this is my insanity running full circle--my delusion forming the final corners of its perfected justification, its little realm, its perfect porcelain world.  I imagine the end of Brazil.

I was saying something.  Oh yes, something more valuable than happiness.  It was contentment.  Facing my four professors every week, the horsemen and horsewoman of the apocalypse, the worry of internships bootstrapping into worries of employment, the increased speed and workload, the earlier starts, the division of my heart and soul, it all did what I could only hope for in my wildest dreams--it got better.  Because, it had to.  Because, for so many reasons.  

Recall the ancient Chinese concept of opposites--or, common sense: the concept of light is coherent insofar as the concept of darkness exists.  Similarly, happiness couples with sadness.  (Extremes are more alike than any other pairing, but that is another ramble for another day.)  Contentment is stability, and to use a descriptor socially tinged with multiple meanings, it is sustainable.  Now, for the sake of hedging, I will say that I am unsure how long this will last.  But today was quite a day, perfect in its normalcy.

Not with a bang but a whimper

We are in a perilous situation, my friends.  But before discussion moves forth, let me pose a scenario.  You are floating at sea during a thunderstorm.  The sky above you shudders with each bolt of lightning, each peal of thunder.  Momentarily paralyzed, you gaze upwards in terror and wonder as the light of the stars stretch toward one another, forming rifts in the heavens, cracking the dome of the world.  This situation falls squarely within the realm of Fear, one of the grander deities in the hierarchy of psychological constructs.  Imagine further, that while you are at sea during this thunderstorm, there appears beneath you a long and wide shadow.  You do not notice it, but it is there.  It consumes, not out of necessity, not even necessarily out of pleasure, but out of sheer ability.  It is unstoppable, it is absolute, and it is coming.  This is the deity of Foreboding. 

This is a terrible situation.   I wish to be clear; when I say terrible, I do not mean it in the colloquial sense of “bad,” or “unfortunate,” but rather the incarnation Yeats used in Easter, 1916—terrifying, without connotations of good or bad.  I have been taught by legends, fairy tales, and morality tales, how to confront these constructs of Fear or Foreboding, but what we are dealing with, my comrades, is something far greater.  We are dealing with the deities of Apathy and Routine.

I believe it was Mill, who, at the beginning of his treatise, Utilitarianism, stated that he had decided to write this book after he was at a point in his life when he had time to sit and think; deconstructing his previous beliefs, and fashioning those still-standing truths into a more ideal form of thought and consideration.  This is not that time.  Perhaps when we were younger, perhaps when we are older, but there is not time enough now, nor will there be for a while. 

Are we, then, to simply resign ourselves to the command of these “lesser” deities?  As a clever man once put it, “the question hardly survives its statement.”  Perhaps, flowing with the stream of bleakness, our power of defiance lies within a narrowly defined box, much like Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.”  Or perhaps, we steal precious moments away, bit by bit, from their dominion, keeping our selves hidden, keeping our selves safe, for a day when there is time enough, and world enough again—this, at least, we must do, for as it goes:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends...