Saturday, June 18, 2011

can I have my job back

"According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people. In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangment and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half." 

Haruki Murakami Kafka on the Shore

I love this idea of how people might have been once, if you stop to think about how much sense it makes when the person you thought was your other half turns out not to be - the betrayal and disappointment because you're not their other half, either. And we pass through life like we do when we shop for fruit, picking up apples that look how apples should look, until we return home only to realise that it's rotten from the inside out when we cut it open. And so back we go, when we can be bothered or when we're out of anything left to sustain us, and the search begins again. But you don't want apples if you're a popcorn machine - you want corn. Only you don't know what you want or what you need because you don't know who you are.

I feel as though ignorance isn't something we can be legitimately frustrated about when we view it through our self-appointed intellectual eyes. Sometimes a piece of writing can make one realise that there is a house outside of the room they've been holed up in, a neighbourhood surrounding that house and an entire nation and world beyond that. And I'm not going to be pretentious and publicise my interest in and knowledge of Objectivism, mainly because I understand as much about the topic as I know that there is cheese in Tasmania. But the ability to submerge yourself in the beauty of its words and visions is more than I can say for the mundane yet highly relevant (apparently) world of marketing.

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