Sunday 21 December 2014

What Kind of Paradise am I Looking For?

It's five o'clock on Monday morning and I am back at my place by the window with my first cup of coffee. I know, (because I have been told) that sounds depressing. I am not depressed. I am melancholic: I love sad things. Those of us with the melancholic disposition are inspired by misery. This is not to say I am a sad person. Quite the contrary, I am a happy soul. So, instead of sleeping, especially since I seldom get a full night's sleep -my sleep comes fitfully, with me dipping in and out of consciousness throughout the night- I find that staring out of the window is an interesting alternative, a better alternative so to speak. In this pre-dawn darkness, I find a solitary kind of happiness. I feel an illusion of aloneness, and despite knowing it is an illusion, or maybe because I know it is an illusion, I embrace the peace that can only be found when alone. I am staring into the proverbial nothingness, my mind's eye trying to form images the way I know them and with others, giving my imagination free rein as I form them the way I'd like them to be. But all too soon, in the light of day, I see everything the way it usually is.

I am a voracious reader. I devour books with a kind of hunger that I am certain can't and will never be satisfied. My Kindle, my laptop, my phone, my physical book shelves are all filled with books because the thought of ever lacking something to read scares me shitless. I spend more time reading than I do any other activity. It is in books that I make friends, travel around the world and acquire immense knowledge which translates to happiness. Every new book shifts my horizon. I find truths in books, especially fiction, because fiction is likely to contain more truth than fact. Books are my anchor: I read when I am happy; I read when I am sad. I read to experience everything across the full gamut of emotions. I feel emotions that I may probably never feel in real life; I become  someone I would never have become without books, and the best part is that I get to change the person that I am with every new book that I read. Someone once said, I forget who, but I agree with this fellow bookish soul, that my library is an archive of longings.

I am a dreamer. While pondering about dreams, Sile, one of the protagonists in Emma Donoghue's Landing, says that dreams pull so unpredictably on the fabric of time. She goes ahead to demystify the default, widespread yet misleading assumption that daytime is the real life. "In the night," she says, "people journeyed far from those they slept beside, they lived out infinitudes of time and in the morning,  they all behaved like adulterers, as if nothing happened." And I tend to agree. I have experienced so much in my dreams. I have been chased by indescribable creatures, I have traveled the world, I have interacted with people I might never meet in my life, I have attended international conferences, I have lived in my own house, I have experienced my worst fears, I have endured terrible pain and I have achieved my dreams. This other life that I have lived -sometimes stretching a whole lifetime and sometimes the brevity of it all makes me second guess myself- is only known to me. I might never experience all these things in my real life (whatever real life means) but I have felt them so strongly, it's as if  I have lived them. Fernando Pessoa says that life is fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us. I find immense comfort in that thought.

In all these: sitting alone and staring in the dark; reading an inordinate number of books; and dreaming (living in my head) I believe I am looking for a paradise that is inevitably and eerily elusive. While on this other side of paradise -the preparadise- I try my best to conjure the image, to paint the picture of my paradise. I have imagined my paradise, made both minor and major changes and then done away with it. I am back at the drawing board, unsure of what kind of paradise I am looking for.

The title of this post is from the song Grey by Ani DiFranco.

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