The Soul, Released
What would it be like to have chosen only the most difficult paths? No safe routes, no comfort zones, no relaxing pastimes, no settling for the familiar, for what is “good enough,” or for “what works.”
What would it be like to do, each day, only what seems most compelling, without regard for how it affects one’s daily tasks and practical goals? That is to say, without regard for security, for later.
What would it be like to live impervious to all attractions and distractions unrelated to the primary end, the essential compulsion, as though one had begun one’s life with the most distant peaks already clear before one’s eyes, and hence grown up without need of all those false steps and partial views that engender the restrictive habits and distorting tastes which a serious person spends the rest of his life striving, haltingly and so often failingly, to cut loose in the hopes that the atemporal soul may at last soar to its natural heights?
What would it be like to hear only the music, without the obscuring veil of idiosyncratic personal associations? Or to read ancient words without the centuries-long game of Chinese whispers through which they reach us? To grasp every reference and intuit every original intention as the philosopher’s or artist’s most intimate contemporary would?
To live with such questions as one’s primary source of light is to embrace an endless and essential (and sometimes exquisite) suffering as the price of being alive. To live without them is to slumber in the half-light of the half-living, a slave who does not even know he is a slave.
