the world going by
How strange it is for me, being alive today. Everything is half nightmare. Why do I think so much and am so afraid without it? I do not dare give up my thinking.
Why am I in college? My salvation must be in being literate. Or it must be I've assumed that. And so I'm as crazy as the rest. Or as blind.
The sun set tonight out the window, and the sky from light to dark through dark blues. Now it is black. And tomorrow in the morning the sun will rise. Again out the window. And tomorrow night it will set again out the window. The world is going by out the window.
The world is going by out the window. This is our basic knowledge. It is ignoring us, passing us by. And where are we? We are 'students'; we are in college. In some classrooms we do not even have windows for the sun to rise and set through. We have doors, that you go through, instead. Classrooms without windows, doors gone through and to be gone through, are what education is all about. At least you would gather as much from a visit.
More and more I think I must be an animal, and not a human. I do not think like a human, I hardly feel like one. I am hard pressed to keep up the front and the act. I want so much to be a human, for these others to like me and love me. Human is what they are, or say they are.
But for moments I'm beginning to wonder now—could it be a few of them, too, struggle to keep up the front? Could a few of them, too, not be human?
Often I would be persuaded it's so: but only while they are shy and quiet, or their minds appear shaken or shy. Only then, when they are supposed to be students and they fail for a moment. But in the next moment, when they are no longer supposed to be students, in the next moment, when the bell has rung and class is gone, when they are supposed to be 'young adults', 'people', whatever; suddenly I become unpersuaded: they make such unfailing 'young adults' and 'people'.
So that I cannot continue to doubt but they are humans, and I am not. And their failure as 'student' was only illusory, or perhaps 'student' is not quite, and not totally, 'human'. But most likely the former: I was deceived by my own imagination, and not by the magician's sleigh of hand. It is I am the magician, in pretending to be human.
Yet I can't help wondering, and hoping. What if they too are the deceivers and I am the deceived? If we are all magicians? And all of us our own audience?
What then, my friends?
