arda alahasta

     “Take, for instance, a story I read once in a book. An island tribe sailed to a neighbouring island, and upon encountering this new island’s human inhabitants, proceeded to attack and enslave them. The second tribe submitted despite their greater numbers, for their culture was one of peace and resolution through unarmed discourse. They were overruled by the tyranny of violence that reigned superior to peaceable diplomacy. I see a flicker of something akin to confusion in your eyes - similar, but not quite the same. I recognize it because it’s the same emotion I experienced upon reading this story. At first, my heart was broken for the good people of the second island who exemplified those wonderful, democratic ideals that we claim to value so highly as symbols of evolutionary and moral superiority, that we claim separate us from the barbarism and indecency of the animalistic. With our so-called respect for these values we can shamelessly claim a divine-like transcendence in ourselves and the world we’ve created.
     “But then I was immediately thrust to the opposing position. For is the world itself not barbaric and ruthless? If one is to claim a right to life, should one not take it by any means possible? This is how things work in every other sphere of the world, and even the most cursory examination of human history would imply that such is the nature of our own existence as well. In that case, did not the decimated tribe receive just reward for their pathetic defense of their inherent right? Should they not have fought for their existence, accepted the realities of the world for what they are and discard naive ideals incompatible with the world they inhabited?

     “And so I ask you - are you a romantic or a realist? Which realm do you choose to inhabit? Will you confine yourself to the limitations of an idyllic world of divine mortality, one that can exist permanently only in your ephemeral consciousness? Or do you accept your fate as a being of finite, material existence whose only salvation lies in your willingness to defend it, in all its magnificence, in spite of its undeniable insignificance?”

The Happiest Man

    A hundred years of summer couldn’t bring him the happiness that he felt in this very moment. He looked around the neatly kept room, his eyes falling across each familiar corner, and smiled the absent-minded smile that sneaks up on us when we reflect on everything with contentment while thinking of absolutely nothing, for indeed there is nothing that needs to be thought of. The endless stream of worries had somehow ceased; financial woes, the bothersome hiccups in an otherwise healthy body, irksome familial obligations, occupational tribulations, foreboding appointments that loom ahead demanding to be kept sooner than we prefer to, and every other trifling daily necessity that pops up to divert us from the prearranged routine of our lives - all these had at some point melted away and left him with nothing but the present, a crystallized moment of perfection. This was it.
    A breeze played upon his closed eyelids. He opened them again, and immediately noticed the smile that had usurped his face. His brow furrowed. For all the times he had taken in these surroundings - the crumbling brick wall, the heavy-laden bookcase, the dim lights, the ragged curtains pulled back to let pools of sunlight spill across the carpeted floor and spread into every corner and crevice usually tucked away in shadows - it all seemed strange. He saw everything he expected to see, but somehow differently. He could almost convince himself that in his absence someone had replicated every object in his home and replaced them - from the voluptuous couch to the tiniest trinkets and scraps of paper long ago placed on a shelf and subsequently forgotten. Some intruder had taken care to deliberately place them exactly where they had been, he was certain. He could not have said where the broken picture frame had been tossed, but when he saw it he knew that it was where it had been before he left, and this somehow left him more unsettled than if it had shown up on some unexpected shelf or in some rarely used drawer. These were all his things, but at the same time…he looked at the desk he had toiled over countless nights. There were the coffee rings indelibly stamped on its surface, the scratches from numerous journeys to and from various apartments. All the evidence of their shared past were there, but when he looked at it, he sensed that this was not the same desk. No longer could he relate his past to its past. He no longer felt that they shared a history, but rather that they had come from separate origins and converged upon this moment and he was being tricked into believing that their histories were one and the same.
    A wave of revulsion swept through him. He leapt up, hit his head on the slanted ceiling, staggered to the bathroom while tripping over the coffee table and grabbed the sink, feeling his knees give way beneath his heaving body. He looked up slowly and he caught a pair of eyes staring into him. They were cold and invasive. Terrified, but unable to turn away, he watched as the eyes methodically took him apart, deconstructing him piece by piece. Their icy gaze spiralled deeper and deeper into the gyres of his gruesome insides. Disgust, horror, fear, all gave way to an almost maniacal denial. Who were these eyes to judge him? By what authority did they flippantly deny the present and dredge up the intangible past, lauding it as more real than the happiness that now consumed him? Desperately he tried to mock them with a defiant laugh. Ha!  he cried, and fell back in horror when they mimicked his pathetic insolence with perverted contempt.
    With a cry, he fled out the front door and into the street. This couldn’t be the conclusion to his tireless pursuits. He would not allow this to be the denouement to the resolution he had found moments ago nor would he abdicate his beatitude to its depraved tyranny. He knew those eyes that had stared back at him in the mirror, was sickened by the intimacy with which they scoured the depths of his soul. Years of torment had nurtured in him a nauseating contempt for their deceptive whisperings, while the potential for something more than the mere appeasement by the world had been flaunted before him and was being tossed back at him as no more than a delusional fairy tale. Had he been lied to? No one had told him simple desires were exceptional, but no one had said they weren’t either. What was it they had promised him? Was it happiness or just the chase? He frantically wondered what would become of him, he who had defied the laws of nature and tasted the fruit of perfection. The cost of perfection would be its utter demise, he knew it yet he could not abandon it for the barren realm of mere existence.

    He heard it before he saw it, the car rumbling around the corner. He heard the familiar backfire of the tired motor, and with it his heart skipped three beats. He galloped over, certain with the knowledge that he would never tire, his heart pounding in his ears, blood coursing through every limb with the scintillating heat of life. For a moment he caught his reflection in a darkened window, and it was in that moment that he finally recognized himself - not as the grotesque form he had seen inside, but as he had always dreamed he would, as he always knew he would be. In that moment he decided where his loyalties lay. Not with the tedious pursuit of an impossible future, but for his own self in its truest manifestation. At last he flung aside the futile hopes of an impossible world that had so long poisoned him, purged himself of their acerbic casuistry and cleansed himself in the purifying absolutism of the present. He saw her turn her head back to the front of the car, and in that moment their eyes met and with wonderful ease he felt himself fall in love, wholly and inexplicably. “This is it!” he cried with evangelical fervour, and opened his arms as the car lurched forward one last time.