First year philosophy blues

“Keep your options open” rings out the hollow chamber “You are special”.

“But there are so many doors” you plead “behind which one lays happiness?”

Only a grimaced silence answers, and your bones grow weary and surly and frustrated. What happens, you ask yourself, when you cannot decide behind which handle lays what has been described to you as ‘happiness’, and you wait and ponder and hope, only to come to the conclusion that no, happiness was never an option at all?

I can tell you what happens.

Permit me to answer this question with another: what happens when things cease to matter at all, and all the silver arches and stone gargoyles from your dreams (life?) turn to mud, and are swept away by the relentless tide that comes with the moon? That moon that sheds its luminous glow, that casts flickering shadows on the cold wet sand, the sand that stretches for eternity beneath our trembling and apprehensive feet?

Plato was wrong; logic and rationality is not the sun, but rather the moon. To those whose eyes have been shrouded by the cynicism that accompanies rational knowledge (or more so a thorough understanding of our lack thereof), the moon would be more comparable, hanging low and fat off the branch of a tall apple tree, the fruits of knowledge awash in the poisonous, sterile glow.

And then the doors start to peel off in front of you, the plaster fails, and the big picture starts to come down, firstly at the edges, and lastly in a heap. Behind all those doors that used to be in front of you lays an old projector and a massive screen. Project yourself, it whines and splutters, because that is all that is real. There is nothing you perceive or think or know or love or feel that is not just you feeding a reel or writing a script or playing make believe.

But to all of you who find this paralyzing, who find it binding and suffocating, to those who look past the painted veil and see absolutely nothing, well join the club and get over it already.

It’s just first year philosophy blues.