Abbreviated avant-propos:
English, instead of Vietnamese, is used because of the following considerations:
1. My only child can have easy access.
2. Ease of typing ("hỏi" and "ngã" orthography would slow me down tremendously) and speed. I'm lazy and pressed for time.
3. I'm fighting against the onset of Alzheimer's syndrome. The moment I no longer access secondary languages, I know then darkness closes in for good, and not only intermittently as it is doing now. Mistakes in grammar because of illness and ignorance will be unavoidable.
So please, dear reader (if there's any out there), don't fling epithets like "deracinated" and "showing off" at me.
The singular personal pronoun is to be used to avoid affectation and appearance of narcissism and far-out autobiographical elements. The following is an attempt of "fictionalized" writing
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You are an accidental man. That does not mean you were an unwanted child, conceived in a haphazard fashion, without love nor forethought. On the contrary, your father assured you that your parents loved each other dearly and they both wanted another son. They had had four sons, three had died during infancy. Your surviving brother, twelve years your senior, was the heir. You would be the spare, ensuring the father's line would not die out.
Yes, "accidental" was a shameless borrowing of the title of one of Anne Tyler's novels. However, since the appearance of the novel, the word has crept into the vernacular. Not until last night did the awesome irony of life imitating fiction weigh down on you. You were on an outing, visiting London's famed Soho District. A lady in your group, for whom you had respect, was inches from getting hit by a city bus. Praise to the alert bus driver! The traveling members of the group were stupefied by the "almost" accident. When you approached her and asked her what exactly happened, she replied that she had not seen the bus approaching. She was busy concentrating on getting across the street to get to the waiting taxi. For a person who almost got hit by the proverbial bus, she was remarkably composed. She then added the following words that haunted you ever since, "I am a good person. I am always lucky. God always protects me." She is a die-hard Catholic while you are a dyed-in-the wool atheist. Blind and unquestioned faith is foreign to your make-up. Prayer is a form of self-hypnosis and auto-suggestion. But from experiences, you know there are many good Catholics out there, as are many atheists. Beliefs in one way or another are just fortifications and reinforcements of one's set of values. One is not supposed to be "better" than others. But tragically, while outwardly we pay lip service to egalitarianism in religion and beliefs, deep down inside we are convinced that what we believe are absolutely true and indeed superior to what others believe. Man is a social animal very much into hierarchy. Let and let live is foreign to him. He is always busy imposing what he believes onto others. He believes in the value of numerical superiority. He thinks that the more people share his beliefs, the sounder are his beliefs. Also, religion and politics and socio-economic status are inseparable. There are practical survival reasons to spread his beliefs. He seeks protection in the crowd and the tribe, as he has been doing since the dawn of time. There are a few, lonely humans who know the values as well as the dangers of conformism. They are against the follies of conformism, but they are smart so they are quiet. You are not smart. You can't help yourself. You were born to talk, to yak away the time, to mark your passage through life. Writing is a form of prayer for you, a form of self-hypnosis, an attempt of self-enlightenment. And life, to you, is a series of serendipitous as well as gratuitous, accidental, and unpleasant events waiting to happen. In some ways, you are a fatalist.
Anyway, you read recently, and accidentally no less, in AARP magazine (January 2014) that
1. The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.
2. Difficulties are the opportunities for inner growth.
3. You have to be willing to let go of the life you planned in order to make the life you're meant to live.
4. Our job on this planet is to elevate, not to knock down, each other.
That's who you are. You are open to serendipities and accidents. When they occur, you are marveled at the mysteries and origins of them. Are they really chance events or part of the "butterfly effect" as advocated by chaos theory? Or are they part of the "Character is Fate"?
Not all what you think and believe are borrowed from others, however. Slowly a simple but majestic truth has been dawning on you. That is, other humans don't necessarily think and feel the same way as you do. We may look similar, but we are all different from one another because of genetic make-up and mutations, and of differences in upbringing and indoctrination, and in life experiences. So, please, empathize, don't generalize. Don't self-project either.
All truths are individually experienced.
Wissai
October 24, 2014
London, England.
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