Vertigo

So I was listening to Coldplay's new album and was loitering outside my bunk in a somewhat contemplative mood. See the good thing about my camp is that there is no light pollution or high rise buildings (which only goes to prove the horrid 'rural-ness'), so the sky, at night or in the day, are comparatively brilliant. And once again, I realised how small we are. You know how when you look down from a really tall building and get vertigo? I looked up at the sky, and I got vertigo. All of a sudden I felt this great expanse of nothingness, imagination took flight and rationality surrendered all judgements. Rationality surrendered its sense of 'magnitudity', its sense of volume and it surrendered its will to navigate the expanse. Some great fear struck me in the chest, and vertigo was upon me like a pack of vultures. I saw nihilism's advent, saw through it to its demise, but like a plague that brings prophecy on it's wings, it returns. Then I remembered Kundera's words in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. "Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves." It was then that I saw not meaning in his words, but beauty. The mess of lines scrawled across the pulp of a dead tree, bound together with as much tenacity as wind, was beautiful. I realised then, that the epithets and eludcidations we have come to construct, come to demolish and reconstruct, cannot explain themselves. the very language we have come to rely on, a mystery in itself. The ever-lasting quest for Truth starts without a clue what Truth is. The ever-lasting quest for Beauty, has no idea what Beauty is. The ever-popular quest for Freedom, does not know what Freedom entails. Man crawls around on all fours with his mind. The Truth may sit and stare at him in his face, but his pride, language and senses are turned elsewhere. And Truth mocks us all.

The human condition is such, in the realm of nihilism, all is such. The war against nihilism will continue, but even within the non-truths of nihilism, there are truths. There will always be exceptions. If all is up to chance, if man cannot do anything to reach truth, then it is in those limitations we see the strength, the beauty, of man. To spend an eternity reaching something unreachable is akin to martyrdom. If all man is but a mess of flesh and blood, if all can be reduced to such basic entities, then let it be so. But man can never deny itself of consciousness, even if one day it should too be reduced. Man can never deny the ideas that he feels necessary to uphold. Man may deny his choice to choose between upholding and otherwise, but he can never deny the existence of his ideas. The beauty is not in the idea, but in the nihilistic man upholding the idea. If Nihilism can deny us Truth and Freedom, it cannot yet wrest Beauty from us.