From the Moment You Begin Living, You Begin Dying.
To be alive, is to know that life is a paradox. From the moment you begin living, you begin dying. On hearing podcasts, I listen someone shouting; “You sacrifice your health in order to make money. Then you sacrifice money to recuperate your health. Then you become so anxious about the future that you stop enjoying the present; the result being that you do not live in the present nor the future. You live as you’re never going to die, and then die having never really lived.”
Art in its essence is a lie, whose purpose is to seem real. The next sentence is true. The preceding sentence is a lie. Indulge me for a moment. The writer and the reader, though a unity are always at loggerheads. 9 My purpose is to surprise you, dazzle you. Every sentence is a shot at uncertainty. Your purpose is to understand, your creative faculty always sensing what the future holds. I’m trying to cage your attention, while it constantly wanders. You’re trying to get hold of it, while you keep reading.
What’s beautiful in this equation is that in an environment, where rationality should breed distrust, where the reader should never trust what the writer says, they are expected to blindly agree. Fiction becomes an illusion. The aesthetic explains this in a way, that to achieve unity, the reader becomes the writer. The reader in his own creative imagination lives the story to a point where to read fiction is to sublet an apartment off reality. The contradiction to this is self-awareness, of being misled. This is where fiction and reality merge. Literature becomes meta-textual. I ask you to become a part of the story. Go, read the fifth line, from the second paragraph and return. I break the flow, to delude you. While you think initially that the 9 is an error, it is a cheap meta trick that I pull. I am just a stranger to you. The distrust comes to the surface. Fiction, in its illusory magic becomes a replica of life. When you become self-aware, you ask yourself- “Who am I now when I am not a reader?” Existentialism is a by-product of self-awareness. Stop scratching your head now. Literature is meant to make you question things about yourself. The counter paradox is, that if I am not the reader, then I can be the writer. If not writer, I can be the blank sheet, an eye witness of every writer’s fall. A meaning begins to emerge out of literature, and consequently life. But it is not as simple as that. You question if you can trust literature and are not being misled. The maddening question of free will is born out of pages.
Then the writer says that it’s time to leave. There are no answers. This is the last illusion. There is a quote by Montaigne- “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?”
Think. Sleep. Wake up. Welcome to paradox.
