User talk:Paulitamariella

Column: I was within and without. Column Title: Great Perhaps

You could argue the vague and intimate variance of life but regardless, I was always inclined to believe two things: there is only the living and the dead. In all common knowledge, the living is exactly that of the dead except they possess coherent and enchanted breaths allowing them to experience and witness life’s immense phenomenon. And then that of the dead whose hearts will never involuntarily pump the miracle of life and whose souls will remain lost in the unknown emptiness of the void.

In all truthfulness, being raised and inevitably growing up in the world and then blindly accepting the constant conceptions of life that has been established in all generations has indeed proved itself unbecoming. As everyone else superciliously unascertained, and I, superciliously overlooked, we have unknowingly disregarded parallel thoughts existing not somewhere around life but rather through it.

By all means, I have sailed with the currents. I exist and I have participated in this colossal chain of interactions and interconnections, bounded by the communist nature and seemingly witnessing the vast variety of abstracts for us, around us, and within us. I was within.

Within: in a greater sense of simply existing and living just as how the ghastly system incontrovertibly want. Our very presence in any terms of variables makes us within. But it was never entirely just that. Greatly attached to the wonders of life, we have unjustly neglected an entire world in the great distraction of another. We have looked closer and closer; too attached and too close to see. The more we submerge being within, the less we see.

And in all vanity, I knew. I knew, in that day, in those minutes, lost in words, that no one truly knows the world at all. “Wear your shoes and come. Let’s talk.” I have always hated wearing shoes and also hated yet the constant conception of sitting properly in class. But what’s more peculiar was the very occurrence of having my art teacher, who hardly knew me, demand a few minutes of my time; without cracking a single hint of the great impact that lies waiting to be known.

It was one of those rare talks with a quality of eternal significance in it. It was the kind of talk that has found its permanent home in my memories; the one that brought me an enchanted promise that I am remotely a lot of steps ahead of everyone else; uttering the exact words that I seem to be unknowingly looking for all this time.

After a week, I still remembered the rest of that conversation. It had something much to it that gave it a sense of identity; that addressing it as just a “talk” or a “conversation” would be a major insult. The constant conception of life in words has once again failed me, but there was no going against it. And so at the end of that day, I settled by unwillingly referring to it still as a “talk.” Even after years and years I know that I would take it with me forever. “I read your essay.” He started and went on and on, appreciating how it was written beautifully and promising that there was something in me that no one else has. “Of all the students I know and all the essays I read, yours has so much significance and value in it. It’s something that you don’t read every day and you seem to see things that no one else can and then understand it in a way nobody else could; you think deeper than everyone else and I believe that’s something worth pursuing, what are your plans?” He asked me to find him in 10 years time and tell him all about what has become of my life.

Right then and there, I found my sense of purpose. It was the way he appreciated something I thought nobody will ever bother to appreciate. I was always delighted, in the most meaningful sense of that phrase; in the ineffable fact that his words unintentionally meant a great impact in my course of life and on the face of it, made me downright understand what Fitzgerald was trying to say. It faced – or seem to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice on your favor. It understood you so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to be believed in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hope to convey.

Forgive my vanity but it was all but lies. In that moment, I was overwhelmed by the realization that I am certainly not living at all. Yes, I was within but not entirely, I was living but at the same time alongside the boundary of life and nothingness; staring and understanding the cosmic life that recedes before me. I wasn’t too dwelt within; I was a few steps back, just enough distance to merely partake in life and enough distance to see not a closer but a bigger picture.

I have indeed physically included myself within the life around me but firmly separated myself from the constant conceptions of life and rationally living without the existing world but rather existing in a peculiar disembodied view that doesn’t exist around life but through it; never truly belonging due to the vast diversity of individuality and accustomed to see the unseen – I was without.

Fitzgerald believed that everyone suspects himself of at least one cardinal virtue, and I, pretentiously believe that mine is: seeing the unseen. But there was one thing I didn’t see and had overlooked. There were never just two general variations of life, there are three: the living, the dead, and the within and without. Paulitamariella (talk) 06:09, 13 October 2013 (UTC)