APOLOGIA

I, deserving of a fair life, never enjoyed the excesses that wealth so prodigiously brings. To us, God was never over-kind, for our possessions were not huge: a small edifice was my home, a wooden hovel my church, and a widow’s well-earned pittance was all my siblings and I had to live by. It is not with fondness that I summon to memory the insufferable years of my tempestuous youth, when maladies like rabid hounds pursued me, and sight began to decay from my eyes. And so I had to learn to find content in contention, and to devour whatever fate pressed upon my lips. Every eve, I often sallied far from home, venturing into the unwelcoming dark : a sullen saunterer lost in melancholy. There, in solitude, silence is an orchestral melody; beauty lies frozen in time amongst the stars; and when warm midnight showers fall to bestow their pure freshness upon the earth, one may feel that night is truly fairer than day.

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Perhaps life is a mere phantasm of dreams. Are the personages of our dreams – or intimate friends, our faithful foes, or the strangers we falsely call family – not as real as those whom we encounter after we awake? Do you not wish to be left undisturbed when your head against the pillow is pressed, and long for that moment when you shall never be stirred from your delicious slumber? In your final wakeful hour, as you savor the pleasant warmth of your bed while in recollection of times past: the mind ceases to sustain its sanity, divesting reality into a wondrous scenery of illusions whose peculiarity they borrowed I know not whence; apparitions immortalize themselves into forms within the elements of our imagination, amalgamating into a persistent entity, revealing a foreign region in whose architecture perfection becomes perceptible: the unreal, then sudden realized, is perceived in its own profound appeal. This wondrous moment often passes unnoticed, and we are never conscious of how we fall asleep.

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Unsatisfied with life’s daily provisions, it is here that we quench our covetous thirsts and pursue illicit pleasures; where the hours never hasten. Oh! How we wish that we would linger here forever…. And when the dreamer awakes to find reality is the sole object of his dreams, misery admits herself into his heart.

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Why do men disdain life so exceedingly that they treasure the few hours of night they spend away from it, yet the mere thought of death terrifies their timid souls to useless prayer? Horror scalding their hearts, pain vibrating beneath their breaths, the fear of the unknown advances upon them like a plague. They are born into a tranquil world, but when the perils of life assail, they crave the comfort of heaven and turn their eyes skyward, only to discern nothing but the clouds that will water their graves. From birth we must learn to live, and in living, learn to die. We are indeed creatures of profound stupidity, and wasteful of time, to live in fear of the inevitable. All must drink of its poisoned cup. What else can man know of death? The poor instruction dispensed in schools breeds these fools of frivolous disposition, who value sleep more than wakefulness, who know not that the profits of temperance outweigh the few joys of indulgence, whose minds are detained by the absurd articles of their faiths, and can kill a fellow man when the sole incentive is the desecration of a book’s leaves. I do not blame them, for from their childhood, they have been put under the instruction of men who are masters at nothing.
Indeed, school denies the juvenile mind the divine aspects of mastery, and muddles it with worthless study. In the end, we forget all that we have learnt, except a few things that we would have grasped on our own.

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In a wicked world run in wicked ways, everyone endlessly shortens his days. Mankind is oft unkind, and it takes only a woman to corrupt a saint. Every man is his own inveterate foe: within all acts of kindness lies a potency of evil, and every angel is but a demon in disguise. Upon the pure we cast an immodest eye, and the vile we deify. Unless, in the advent of his life, man attempts to triumph over the incessant vexation of his own soul to strive for self-satisfaction, such shall be his fate: to live a worthless life and soon perish, and fade fast into the forgotten past like he never lived at all.

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Ensconced upon this throne, their God watches as they draw closer towards the quietus he so creatively composed for them: some to a dreadful end in the jaws of a savage creature, some to brutal torture, some to starvation, rape and other calamities: each man in his own fashion to an inevitable death. Why should we live only to depart thus? Why does he obtrude this on us? In wisdom, my sadness begins…

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It is in my moments of desolation that I wrap myself around such thoughts, often until the clock strikes midnight, ere I dote upon my constant lover: the Art and Play of Chess. Here, every man is the master of his own fate. To survive, your faculties must be disciplined by the indelible instruction of experience and guided by the effulgence of raw genius. Every move must be calculated with powerful precision, displaying the valor of a beast and the caution of a sage. You must assail your opponent from various quarters at once, unleashing an unstoppable sequence of events that will lead him to his prescribed fate: utter destruction. Life imitates chess. Bound by the unalterable laws of men, and with his mind as his sole artillery, I wonder, can God triumph here, in the domain of mortals?

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