Weltschmerz

I ache. A suffused languor devours everything. This is not so novel, but an attendant physical lethargy, and sensation of decay and falling away, a weeping nausea, render the experience less than ordinarily enjoyable. I don't particularly know why I state all this - I don't expect anybody to care. The truth is that nobody does care, particularly when one is alive. When one dies, things become more ambiguous - people feign care in the knowledge that, morally, they ought to care. Their emulation takes on the mantle of verity. Their sententious averments of devotion are indivisible from the real thing. I think this explains much of the world's sense of submerged hostility - there is no punishment for inauthenticity. We can get away with pretense. How vile to live in a sphere of emotion which is entirely falsified, not because it is moral to falsify, but because it is expedient to do so. We are dead because our emotions pretend to be alive. We are more mechanical because we pretend to be less mechanical. Untruth corrupts everything. It is the negation of that which we fear which realises the fear more palpably. And that is the tragedy of life. Whatever we fear must consume us. 

I have been meditating on my time at this blasted university, and it occurred to me that I have not really given myself the best chance in academia. My mind would probably have been better suited to something abstract, like philosophy. I cannot stand the specific or the quotidian. I have realised in recent years that all external reality is illusion, and that seeking to analyse specifics is a complete waste of time. Things either are or are not, and to question things as they ideally are is far more rewarding than to question how they are made manifest in the world. Economics is so foul because it places tedious rules and models before morality.

Yet most people, I have found, do not think beyond the parochial scope of their immediate surroundings. They enjoy the Small Things. They love poring over facts and figures. They salivate at the little scraps of fiction which weave their reality. They take a salacious joy in the recognition that ten pence has gone astray in the Ponzi scheme of their mind. I cannot exactly claim that my pattern of thought is strictly better than this, but mine does at least distance me from reality, for which I am grateful. Moreover, I despise this notion that we are but cogs in an infinite machine, mobile atoms chipping away at the mine of economic growth, that all our material 'achievements' serve only to prepare the next generation for an identical life of drudgery and toil. I used the word mechanical earlier - it seems to me that there is something innately mechanical in human life itself. To perceive something beyond this - something which is, if not lasting, at least nourishing, a spring in a vast desert - must surely be the purpose.

The only essay for which I received a first at university was an essay on the Marxist conception of ideology, which I feel says a great deal of my academic inclinations. University has never interested me enough. Life is too fascinating to be condensed into these sterile tubes of thought, and I think that is why the world appears to be entirely bland. Rousseau was of course correct when he described the ills of society, but the destruction of reality and the abasement of knowledge are things he did not linger enough on. We know that the Greek system of knowledge was more pure, more sincere, more general than ours, yet I think we still feel ours to be superior - our system in which one must be an expert to have an opinion on the world, in which we must seek to validate the irrepressible phantasms which spring from the heart in moments of elevated innocence. Knowledge is received, not dictated. It is when we are most quiescent that we descry most clearly the vivid hues of life. It is for this reason that our strange modes of scientism are largely futile. The hollow structures we build on the marsh of life are invariably distantiations from truth, not apprehensions of it. Is it not enough to live?