After averting your eyes from the sun, the world becomes desaturated, filtered through drab blue lenses. Effervescent nebules of light may linger, but they are only afterimages seared into the retina and brain. They serve no ulterior motive than to echo the illumination forever exiled from the mind.
People spend lifetimes recapturing these instants, unaware that, once attained, they become henceforth unattainable. Memory will elevate and pervert—thus further elevating and perverting—until the imagination can conceive no robuster hues or more concordant tones. What was once the image of perfection, if re-experienced, would lack the luster of discovery.
What comes next, when the greatest moment of your life is achieved? What further motivations are to be found, when self-actualization migrates backward from textbooks to history? What more is there to do, what further aims to reach, what summits to conquer, when Everest is tamed?
Unlike aspirants filled with zeal, those fulfilled are empty vessels, occupied only by the vacuum of ennui. Is the only solution a constant reevaluation of goals? An incessant, unnoticed redefinition of acceptable, so that success is never perfect, perfection is never achieved, achievement is never successful?
Pursue the sun, and you will only find blindness.
^Eloquence apotheosized
ReplyDeleteIn the novel "Blindness" by Saramago (or something) many people abruptly turn blind for maybe a couple of months, when they all suddenly regain their sight. The last lines are "I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind. Blind but seeing. Blind people who can see, but do not see." I don't know if there's any real correlation but that's what I thought of reading the above.