Another Choice

Thus do we go hither and thither in solitude as in the crowd, accompanied with shadows and clarities, as present themselves to us all such and such options, variations on the same theme.

And then we ache, we feel this sorrow and this need: a need that grows without our active will or knowledge, a need to comprehend, a need to find another certainty than the one that is imposed on us.

And the questions arise: why are we subjected to error, to fear and fright, why this essential ignorance?

From where do our desires come, that drag and possess us?

Our joys, that uplift and liberate us?

Our ambitions that gnaw at us, our hopes that sustain us?

What is this confuse, inarticulate baggage that weighs us down, glues us, betrays us, that wears us?

What is this force of inertia that undermines all our efforts?

Is there no one but us in this whole universe?

Are we condemned, and why, to doubt everything, to oscillate incessantly and with no respite from the absurd to the reasonable, indefinitely producing other versions of the same illusion of being?

Why this human being?

Is there nothing, no one at all keeping watch?

To what end these grand realizations, these elaborate societies, these brilliant machines, these enthusiasms and these elegances and these flights of the intelligence and these forages and breakthroughs into matter and this increasing complexity of experience, if we remain powerless before a child’s pain, incapable of protecting the earth from our own debaucheries; ignorant of how to shift to a more worthy state?

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