Nobel lecture of Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote:
There is a strange and compulsive disorder that pegs me to imagine the possibilities of existence of “the other” in place of “the real” continually. And this crops up in matters ranging from the most mundane and insignificant to the most sacred and occasional. And not so surprisingly, one of my foremost preoccupations when I started writing was in conjecturing what I would do if I were not a writer, the mind verily accepting the possibilities of such a reversal, dropping notions of time and loosing hold of its idea of existence then. That was as romantic as it was solemn, an irony that fuelled another by being the fount of the inexplicable bursts of creativity that characterizes my initial writings. The innumerable visitations of luck that propelled me to do what I did, as you can probably guess now, never found any favor with me. To some this may sound perfectly contradictory, that someone who has looked continually away from what he was, to participate in what he was not only by choosing to be what he was, stands here telling people, whom he got to meet only because of what he is, by writing what he was and is not, the secret behind his detachment from his writing self.
But there lies the catch and the truth. For, ever since I knew, I was shy of the world and I loved to be so. As Ivan Karamazov says in that mighty Russian novel that explores the mind, it was impossible for me to love anybody when I was near them. This, I took to be normal. But the fun started when I came to be interested in those very things that I felt uncomfortable with. Thus began that transportation – where dissociation was the root of all engagement with the world; a world that sprung up from the imponderable depths of the well into which those around you fell, throwing them up amidst new stories that completely different men played a part in just before.
But this detachment leads you both to the heights of ecstasy and the depths of despair in equal measure and pace and in there lies the secret I wish to share with you. Not long ago came that huge wave of libertarianism that swept away the most fashionable of men and women; men and women who first fooled themselves by looking at the world from a pedestal that basically made unnecessary ideologies or views, association or dissidence, without knowing it and who later churned their ideologies with more rigor than ever to explain even that contradiction. Like everybody else, they too had their time. They were able to shout over the rooftops as to why men should be free. Alas, for them freedom came in different shapes and different hues. The cup, surprisingly, was big enough to not let anything slip. They used the old and devious way of explaining sanity by spotting insanity. The proudest among them wanted civility without compromise, believed the individual to be the plough ware of all culture and advancement and ownership of property to be the foundation of all human existence. They dreamt of a heaven on earth where you will have not only the freedom to destroy yourself but also to reserve the right to remain aloof amidst misery and low lives. Compromise is a hated word there – yes, hate wins on a freedom ticket in heaven – and ironically, the freedom to reject this myopic conception of freedom is rejected. Despair plagues you when you are left helpless against sugar-coated history that spoon-feeds content and pride, mistreated history that implores people to believe in simplistic patterns, preachy rhetoric that views moral victories as zero-sum games and outpours of the angst of existence that consume the substance of other’s lives even while failing to recognize the futility of the next bit. So you would always be in a position to post-morph yourself into that next trendy avatar of yours and the saddest and the most grueling part lies in living with this realization – you wink once and you could be whatever you hated or chose to hate earlier.
But you are blessed with ecstasy not because you do not fight the battle yourself. Your arm chair may be your biggest comfort and your pen your weapon-clad soothsayer cum pain killer. But still you hold the ability to loose control, to submit authority and while it frightens you to see the opposite alive and kicking, you can draw comfort because the most tender and the least common too survive and the blunt seriousness even makes it necessary to leave some elbow room for the unheard-of-so-far to exist. And such ecstasy is undeserved because one tides along with the mindless frenzy with which time chases itself, time not be mentioned of them, in its bid to outdo itself and ironically lending credibility to the magical-realist circular notion of time by committing the same errors and revisiting the same dark alleys of experience that fit neatly into our landscpae of unimaginative bullet points. And unfortunately, it speaks not just about our failure to learn about our failures to learn from the past but also warns us that the hope to engage will perhaps be the next major casualty as the charm of the lost moments continue to share the dusty rooms of memory with the false promises of a better future made by bitter experiences.
