It’s my birthday tomorrow. I look back upon the calender with two things on my mind, what has changed since last year’s, and what have I become. Last week I wrote on essay on Joyce and wrote that it is not the series of happenings that makes us into what we are, but it is the culmination of events, the accumulation of experiences, that has shaped me into what I am. How old was Daedalus when he decided to flee from his surroundings? Moreover, is flight the only necessary solution? And for myself, whose wings are clipped at the moment (only by my own admission), what shall I do once I have freed myself from everything? Shall I take flight and risk drowning or stand along the edges while my body weakens?
Am reading Beauvoir, where she tries to find what freedom means to the existentialist, who has no value but that of his own. In the end he still has to measure himself in terms of others. It is difficult to assume the position God, tiresome to keep moving for the sake of moving, defying for the sake of defying, and latch yourself to other people’s values – be it Marxism or Socialism. The debate is endless. In the end, only god persists. Freedom, she then says, can never be absolute, as one is never free to choose whether to be or not to be. We are thrown into existence, into childhood, in an environment we never consented to. Yet it is precisely childhood that shapes our core values, it is the past that one always compares to. Thus one is never completely free.
But nevertheless, the question of our own mortality. And the question of usefulness. What then, have I to say for myself? Yes, of course, I shall be graduating, I have read more books, I have probably written more, I have traveled more, but I fear that all these are what happens externally. Inside, I am all the same. I haven’t grown. Older, but none the wiser.
Perhaps I should finally start writing my own novel.
perkaraperkara 