What to be?
In a brief moment, one reaches a strange crossroad — broad, well laid roads, little sandy ones with brooks lazing over them. Most people don’t pause very much here. You see, the confusion is not with which path to pick but whether the tarred roads have enough space for them. Every once in a while, one lone fool hazards down the other, and everybody stops, stares momentarily with a smug knowledge and walks hastily away on their own. The fool will spend his life in the bumpy terrain of “The Road not taken” (Robert Frost). Oddly, I despise them both.
The former are boring people — and boring people waste our world. To live is to stare into the night sky, at the sea of stars and the unfathomably grand beauty of existence. The ontological question persists: existence to what end? To this end: that scattered amidst celestial chaos, somewhere, exists a perceptive being, albeit a cosmic speck of dust, who stares out into the night sky (like me) and it lights up a part of his soul in unfettered joy — bliss. And the boring are too busy rubbing their nose in the dust to look up and wonder.
The latter are absorbed too much in their simultaneous narcissism and self-pity, that the reason for their choosing the path is not for their own joy but rather because their identity cannot exist but by a great ‘othering’. They seek at every turn to be reflexively different, and are slaves as much to worldly constructs as the former, but in the inverse. And whenever any sense of identity is solely reactionary (with in conformity or flouting), it is ephemeral, or worse still, fickle; “Hey Johny, what are you rebelling against?”, “What’d ya got?” (The Wild One, Kazan, 1953).
Locke’s words, at this point, resound loudly from his grave: “No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke, 1689). If all were born tabula rasa then isn’t any creation of identity borne of context and thus, in some ways, inherently contrived to conformity. Is there an organic, and original way to ‘create’ myself? Is it in Platonic and Descartean Innatism? The solution is synthetic, obviously. That it is through experience that identity and a Weltanschauung is made appears quite reasonable. However, the ascription and judgement of that experience within the mind must bear the evidence of innatism to preserve uniqueness, aiding the creation of a distinctive self compositely. Simply put, if you look at a tall, fair man with shades and a cigarette between his teeth and think to yourself “idiot”, and your friend thinks “wow”, a truly original identity would arise not from the rejection of either one, but their simultaneous coexistence and interaction within the self. You process not just the world as it is, but impressions of it in the minds of other people, that’s why we read/watch/view/listen to the works of the greats. In the silence between sensory memory and its myriad impressions lies the quality of discernment that is fundamental to a sense of self.
The point is however, that if I prescribe my sloppy thinking evidenced above as the definitive answer to this question of ‘what to be?’, then I’ll be not just a smug fool on a tarred road or a self-important pricking wading through a brook, but also pretentious and a hypocrite. Subscription to any ideal inevitably warrants hypocrisy. And I’d rather be a hypocrite from time to time than conviction-less always — and I’m closely saved from being a smug fool by an awareness of my ignorance, aspiring strongly to bloom into complete self-knowledge someday. So until then, the best one can do is go down one’s path, follow bestial instincts, eat, sleep, flirt; but just occasionally, stop to lie down on the grass and look hopelessly up at the night sky, and find bliss in one’s hopeless ignorance.