Graphic by Asyrique Thevendran/The Gazelle, Photo courtesy of Nasa Photo Library

Running with reindeer by the godforsaken, but unquestionably winsome, white stone house, where we used to play as kids. Crossing the path, they suddenly turned up from behind and ran past me, but before that, they ran abreast of me, taking me to nature’s heavens. I laughed with tears in my unnerved eyes, struck by the flickering density of every human experience. Every action, every human movement and every reindeer running contained the tension between the urge for clarity and the abstract realms ever disappearing away. And then I saw the clouds were sweeping along with a frightening weight. I felt left out, deprived of the right to speak in the face of the mightiness that had imprisoned me. All I was seeing had lost its right, too, to speak to me. I was numb, but acutely sincere. Then, a fortifying feeling filled me. My movements were suddenly so lucid; manifestations of air. I was a wind blowing from nowhere, and I had the temper of the blows. The world had caught me, and I had no longer an intention to hold myself back, and this gave me a strange emotion I had never had before.

Later that day, on my way home from the forest, the sky was embellished with purplish glimmers stretching from the horizon and upwards. I still felt the heat of the sun in my face, as if a blowtorch was placed right in front of it. It was a feeling that made my pace slower, so that I would reach the shadows further down the road later. The road was sprinkled with small pools of water from the last downpour, and in them I could clearly spot peculiar structures of pollen that had been formed by today's unstable winds. One of them, not far from my left foot, had a distinctive character, and this made me stop in front of it, gaze onto it, into it. It left me reflecting for some moments, which felt longer than moments usually do. And then the emotion from the forest returned. The slow reshaping of the pollen formations made time appear viscous at first, but then admittedly more lustrous. Time, to me, had an inclination to take on a particular character, but in this moment it wasn’t. I was unsure about how to account for this. The only clear certainty I could get ahold of was this: an unwanted and washed-out notion of time that made it more glaring, horrible and elusive. And then, as the conceptual falsity of my relationship to this world emerged further, I felt this: negation appeals as a way of rising above, of finding home, through rejection. But I could no longer do that; I wanted to be true to the impassable obscurity. I wanted to be extenuated by an admiration of courage; the valor of the unforeseeable soul in its abiding mercy to existential emotions demanding resolution. This edgy faith in the principle of individuation, of being someone in particular,of having been definitely shaped by experience, turned into an object, but a gospel of enfeeblement — a simulation out of fear. My own existence was heavy enough to carry.

Months later, in another part of this world, without permission, we went through the gate, having untied the rope holding the doors of the gate together, with only one thing on our minds: to reach the water on the other side of the construction site. Slowly, subdued by the sedating heat. Soothed by walking in sand so soft that we could have been crossing a field of thick water. And then, without having reached the water, we sat in the sand with our eyes fixed on the glittering skyline; luminous skyscrapers, reflected in the Arabian Gulf; afflicted college hearts, for a little while, surfaced, and sacrificed, to the alienism, unmoving gratuitousness and disrupting excess of existence. I looked down onto my feet and saw, as I continued the examination, the hair on my legs, their unruffled pattern and concluded that in no way did I know myself, but that this was the greatest of gifts. In this body, different spirits had, for a long time, inhibited it, had come and gone and struggled against each other, had been crushed in radical doubt, had been elevated by victorious snippets of realization and had done nothing but empty it. I was rendered a body, but not even that was a graspable thing. It could not be related to anything more than a fleeing and fleeting deer in the forest. I was free-floating and finite, impenetrable and ephemeral, self-reflective and self-corrective, still but ever striving, and I would never, never, find myself through myself; would ever, ever, see myself as a wind blowing, a heart beating, a man living, a stone by the beach and a grandmother dying.

Man’s intercourse with life is his fatal futility, not his free hope. The hand that does not reach all the way gets to touch the richness of absence, and reaches furthest. Every certainty that my intellect had established to put itself at peace, my heart had cut through. The inability to revert to a solid state of certainty, of myself, of what it meant to exist, somehow affirmed the higher truthfulness of surrender; of being filled with free impressions rather than one coherent illusion assimilating all impressions in its image.

An honest faith in life, it seemed, could only start in the humbling immensity of existence. Such was this emotion.