Reality

It's the absurdist problem of life. It all just seems so unreal.

It used to be that my greatest fear was to be forgotten by the world. Now that that has been rectified somewhat, perhaps my greatest fear now is to be forgotten by the real world. It is perhaps the greatest cost of being part of this group of high-flyers. Increasingly, it feels like the world that I am in right now, the world that forms my normal day, is becoming detached from the real world.

Of course, whatever that real world actually is is questionable. I can't really say, because I can only conclude that I haven't been living in it a lot. Perhaps real is equivalent to normal. And yet, my concept of "normal" is not normal enough, and all these perceptions are relative. The only thing that I know, like Kueh, is that right now, this process we are going through is not "real" enough.

There is a certain effervescence in the existence that we lead in school now. The tragic paradox of knowledge, perhaps, that we only seek to know more just so we can get a more accurate picture of how little we actually know. The process of life in class does not seem to be...substantial. When we speak of politics and love and death and all these megaconcepts, there is so little reference to the real world, like we're talking about all these in a vacuum. And perhaps it's necessarily so, because these megaconcepts aren't able to fit into the narrow, unenlightened viewpoint of daily life.

Even triteness seems more true these days. Truisms, cliches, sentimentality, they have the weight of real experience about them, unlike the brutal realism (not cynicism) of our vaunted intellectual honesty. Some kind of ivory tower syndrome, perhaps, is what we're looking at. I can't stand philosophical posturing because it has little to do with the real world. Theory is only justified if it can be used in practice. Talking in circles, weaving air into insubstantialities and calling it reason...even literary analysis has descended into that. I am not interested so much in how the artist puts his message across as in how that message is interpreted by the audience, and then acted upon.

Opinions have no innate value. Opinions remain cheap unless they are accompanied with real change. Increasing frustration nowadays at how little sticking power these opinions seem to have, to the extent that you can switch channels so easily. What is there to hold on to now? Change and flux are facts of life, how do you find anything to build a reality on in the flotsam of experience then?

Simple people are a refuge. Perhaps I too am searching for an innocence that I can borrow. Simplicity and simplistic-ness are different, mind. I search for the former, becoming increasingly hard to find these days, because therein lies perfection, I think. The simple constants of companionship, the simple pleasure of a lasting friendship. Perhaps now, the only constants that we can begin to rely on are people, and only in this elusive shared experience can we find a shadow of truth that we can build a life on. Thank God for the people I know outside the class, outside the school. Keeps things in perspective.

Yesterday watching Cash on Delivery. It was a hilarious production, the HCELDDFS really outdid themselves with this one. But the real highlight was to see the old people (Han, Joel, Yeowch, Matthew) acting and working on the old stage (that used to be where I worked too...), and then to go out with them later. It's really good to feel that the friendship hasn't been lost, that some things haven't yet changed. But it's all in a different context now, and there will be the concern that I am intruding on a new experience, an experienced shared by other people but not me. However, in the meantime, to grasp at the shadows, perhaps, of what used to be, and to see that at least on some level it continues to be so. It keeps things real, in the way that I am used to.

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Hmm...seems like I dissolved into philosophical angst anyway at the end. But I hope that it's understandable. Maybe all I want to say is that sometimes life today seems too (good?) to be true. I seek some sincerity and frankness in other people, and I thank you that I can find it in you.

pondered by phoenican @ 22.5.05