kulturbrille:amanuensis

At a recent gathering of fellow educators, we gazed into crystal balls and saw more of the same. There was thickly brewed coffee, lush carpeting, and glacial sweets between sumptuous meals, which have convinced me that enough, is as it should be, enough, and there will be no more stimulants and intoxicating substances, for a while. It reminds me of what I read, after sunrise, days ago.

‘Ah, you sensible people!’ I cried, with a smile. ‘Passions! Intoxification! Insanity! You are so calm and collected, so indifferent, you respectable people, tut-tutting about drunkenness and holding unreasonable behaviour in contempt, passing by like the priest and thanking God like the Pharisee that you are not as other men. I have been intoxicated more than once, my passions have never been far off insanity, and I have no regrets…

- The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe

Young Werther is wrong, of course, naive, to say the least, and doomed to die for his hubris and transgressions. Respect and worthiness in a person is largely important only to oneself, a measure of one’s state of dunkedness (pardon my impunity, and no, not drunkedness), i.e. how caught up one is in acceptance, social status, etc. And in a recent survey, I saw that there are men these days that have no one to speak to, which is no surprise, considering the many alternatives we have today for real conversation (or real men, and people). There are few today who will take the time to seriously consider another; impressions and hearsay form the basis of the decision to stay and talk, or move on and condemn another to the eternal abyss of strangerhood. True friendship, it might be said, is in danger of becoming extinct; even those we meet regularly or speak with are themselves inconstant and transient. It is telling that we look to silence and eye contact as measures of a friend’s enduring committment. We are never sure, not anymore. A friend today, a stranger tomorrow, torn apart by circumstance, misunderstanding, apathy, and ignorance.

Perhaps we forget too easily that we comprehend time poorly. I have lived a quarter of a century, at the least, and I am frequently alarmed at how little I have accomplished. I am uncouth, uneducated, desirous, hungry and selfish, and will remain in this state of discontent until I die. What mitigates long days and longer nights is the idea that nothing is cast in stone. We are constrained by our lot in life; there are obligations and rules, of all sorts, at all levels, and it is just as important to honour them as it is to turn one’s face to the sun and remind oneself that life is infinitely variable. It is only in Singapore that we are seized with fear that we will, for instance, fail our examinations and thereafter lose all hope of finding reasonable employment, or that if we choose the wrong spouse, we will live a life of miserable single parent-hood and devastating social condemnation. If we do not get into the right schools, the right jobs, the right places, all is lost, and we will then live out our lives as listless automatons, working to feed ourselves, and not much else.

It is not true, of course. Success and moral imperatives have been elevated and mythologised, and it is criminal not to fail but to think of failure as acceptable. And I am guilty as charged; in as much as I make many decisions to follow, crudely, my heart, I am still alarmingly conservative. I still, in my weaker moments, think in terms of predictable endgames and saccharine futures, like any human would. At times I am rash and push such visions away, as I have done recently, and always hope that they will never return, that I might ignite and be burnt away in a flash, but then that is foolishness and another story altogether.

Next year I will take the plunge and live at least one dream.