I’m currently reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, quite possibly one of the best books I’ve ever read. Although the fictional story is about a black boy coming to age in the north and south, I feel that I can somehow identify with his struggle, his feelings, his sentiments regarding naivety and injustice.
No, no, no. I am a fighter. I fight against the stream, against the locomotion of habit. I have no country, no people. I have this frail fragile ego that I neglect as best I can, cause feeding him only starves me, only detracts from the fight. God knows I need to fight more than I need to feed that obscene ego of mine.
The pendulum of her hips left my thoughts utterly suspended, drifting somewhere in that evil world your parents try hiding you from during adolescence when they cover your eyes or muffle your ears. It’s unfortunate that everyone eventually succumbs to these evil exposures, that piety cannot be preserved. However severe the exposure turns out, it seems that innocence will forever plague a parents priorities. The white soulful innocence being thrown to the mud, to the baneful slaughter of swine, is much too painful for a mother concerned with the health and hygiene of her heredity.
Inconsequential. That’s what I think of life. Unless you do something radical. And what is radical? Irrevocable. Unconventional. Something so drastic that it tears people from the white walls of their placidity with a desecrating splatter of shock and awe. Words used to matter. They move the minds of those who have practiced the art of fine-tuning, of finding rhythm amongst the discord, harmony amongst the harrowing howl. But even that’s a stretch. Who know’s why we admire the decrepit preachers of past paramount.
Fear is a response. Nothing is in the world. All is a representation of some prior perception. These perceptions carve out a narrow sliver in reality, dub over this fabricated facticity called time, and ascribe names and symbols for preserving past observations.
I’d love to be an individualist, but I must pay tribute to the society that raised and reared me. I would love to be a socialist, but I may pay tribute to the individuality that contemptuously forces its way onto the world. These anarchistic thoughts arose out of the philosophical contemplation of the irreconcilability of authority and autonomy. There is no legitimate authority if I am to be an autonomous man. Then again, we may say that I am not autonomous: what then becomes of the conundrum?
William Dare 