What does one live for?

A madness, surely.

What does one live for? It used to be a question to muse about at leisure, an abstract philosophical query that I could take up as and when the fancy took me. But of late it’s acquired trappings more somber. The transformation, though a gradual one, is now pressing: its urgency brought on by the madness.  And the madness didn’t take me by surprise either, it is like a disease whose relentless advance you can witness but do nothing about.

We lead a dual existence. Within us, thrive the person who lives, and the person who watches. There is the actor, the I, who acts out his part; and there’s the lone observer in the audience, the eye, the thinker. We can go about our daily lives without much thought, just live it out practically – work, laugh, socialize, sleep. That’s how we strive to live, with some sense of the familiar, some semblance of a routine; it’s easier on the brain. And then every once in a while, we seem to stop and think about our lives, about events, about things said or done, or maybe the larger picture, about where we’re going; that is the stock-taking.

We are born into a world that is in a state of tumultuous flux. But a limited exposure, coupled with an overwhelming sense of wonder that that miniscule snapshot stirs within us, leads us to assume – at least initially – that the world has always been the way it is. This is just one of the many illusions that we are born burdened with; born as we are into a web, an elaborate tapestry of ideas and ideals, of insecurities and boundaries, of beliefs and principles that we are woven into until they shackle us and tie us down.

But we revel in this confinement for it puts us at ease. We could go our entire life and not think beyond the immediate actions of the actor.

We see other people living out their lives, and these are the standards we seek to match, the ideals we try to emulate. We collect purses, shoes, books, houses, people, papers, places, experiences, birds, trees, kilometers, reps, peaks, songs, bikes, guns, rocks, coins, whatever our group considers important, whatever it values, whatever can keep us from thinking.

Perhaps the immensity of space and time, when dwelt upon, is too terrifying; the possibilities in the absolute absence of definite limits too daunting and so we shun it. Instead, we seek comfort in the familiar, occasionally dwelling upon questions like, ‘what does one live for?’ before retreating to a life we are accustomed to. Maybe thought is unnecessary, and it’s best to be just the actor. It is a possibility. But sadly, the process is irreversible. Once you’ve stepped onto the path of thought, it grabs you by the hair and drags you on, and then there’s no going back, especially if you have the madness.

In a story my father sometimes told me, a holy man visiting a wicked landlord blessed him with a settled life and cursed a kindly farmer to a life of wandering. Perhaps it was two villages and not two people, but I forget. The idea, anyhow, was that the wicked landlord’s malice be contained while the kind farmer’s benevolence spread far and wide. I don’t remember if I found the idea of the farmer’s involuntary sacrifice noble at the time, since a settled life is what constitutes happiness for most, and all a farmer would pray for, in story after story, was that the seasons keep turning, the rains be plentiful and the crop, good.           

I often went back to the story and at some point, began to wonder if the holy man had been getting at something that the storytellers missed. Maybe what he wanted for the farmer was not a forced sacrifice, but in fact, a better life. Perhaps Chatwin is right, that we were meant to be wanderers, and settling down ruined it all. Forced out of our comfort zones we would begin to think, and in thought would we come alive.

It comes in bouts, this madness. Like hunger. And poetry. For I don’t think the body can survive sustained exertion. I wake up in the morning and check, like for a cold or a bad throat, for symptoms of it. Maybe it is a disease, caused by some parasitic bacteria that would stand to gain immensely in reproductive fitness if I die unknown in some distant land. And like the rabid dog manipulated into biting and thus infecting his victim, I too must seek out the destiny that awaits me, my fate, maneuvered by the madness.

There is a liver fluke that infests the guts of cattle. It’s life cycle passes through a snail and an ant. The ant bits a blade of grass and is suspended upside down, waiting to be ingested by the cow.

One of the symptoms – or maybe it is the effect – of the madness is a shift in the weights attached to pros and cons. Most decisions in life, like which road to take at a fork, for instance, are made by a value-judgment. We attach weights to the pros and cons associated with each road and then choose the one that comes out on top. These weights, though seemingly objective, are nothing but our subjective perceptions and feelings: they are emotions externalized, projected to future events and predicted as best as can be; and mistakes of judgment occur when we misjudge the weights.

Emotions, though, are not absolute even in their subjectivity. Feelings neither. What pleases me today might not tomorrow, and that is because I change. All of us do, we constantly change. Emotions and feelings draw upon my current worldview, my perspective, my set of beliefs. However, we are fine with most of our decisions because these changes are gradual and though we may be very different people in ten years’ time, we are more or less ok from day to day. The coherence of our lives enables us to make sense of our decisions.

This is where the madness comes in, wreaking havoc. It causes the weights to change dramatically by drastically shifting perspectives and worldviews. With this shift in the framework, one is left floundering for a stable point of reference, an infallible truth that one can rely upon. For instance, when faced by a certain choice, the decisions a settled farmer with a family would make will be very different from the decisions made by a wandering mendicant. And they can both justify their respective decisions to themselves. But what happens when the farmer goes to sleep having made a decision and wakes up in the rough robe of the wanderer, staff in hand?

He can then quote Sartre. “Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it anymore. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them. I am quite at ease this evening, quite solidly terre-a-terre in the world.”

And thus it is that I now seek an answer to that old question that now has immediate relevance; that is now so practical and real. It is supposed to provide me with a framework within which to think.

What is it that one lives for?

I often think of my life as a book I’d like to read; a life less ordinary. But then I run the danger of choosing for my future, the past of famous dead men. Did I say that or did Kazantzakis? I wouldn’t put it beyond myself to simply want a life that is tragic. Why I want this is hard to say. A simple answer I often think of is that that’s what gets the poetry going. Why is poetry important? Well, what else is there to life anyway, but poetry?

Because next to travel, and often alongside it, art is the only real marker of life that I think is worth anything. I may be mistaken, but it is through travel and art that I consider my days well spent.

And happiness is but fleeting, it is sorrow that is deep. It’s almost as if I would like to actively work towards making my life a tragedy. The actor in pain would give the thinker food for thought. The actor living a battered life will ensure that the thinker leads a sublime existence. When you force yourself awake early in the morning, the groggy actor is miserable, but the observer in you revels in that miniscule suffering. I want to let the actor grapple with the meanest of circumstances until he is broken, lash him until the lacerated flesh yields up something inspiring.

The observer is beginning to wrest control over the actor as the bouts of madness get longer, bigger, more ominous. The only thing that holds me back is the ever-diminishing voice that says, this too shall pass: it is but a passing bout of madness.

But what if it leaves in its wake an altered landscape that I don’t recognize anymore? What if the coherence oh my existence actually snaps? Or worse yet, what if I’m stuck forever between the two worlds? Imagine the cracked freeze of the moment when you are able to hold the two discordant perspectives simultaneously: the farmer and the wanderer merging at the frontiers of thought. It is a terrifying place, the mind.

Sometimes I feel the entire burden of a lifetime’s worth of thoughts weighing me down and I don’t even recognize them as mine; and I wonder what it’s all about.

The burden of feeling, says Pessoa, the burden of having to feel.