(2)

My desire for solitude is, perhaps, somewhat excessive.  But it is not, I think, altogether unreasonable.  I suppose I must admit to being something of a misanthrope:  I have a distrust of the human race that runs deep.  As individuals I find humans to be frequently honest, intelligent, and kind, but as a species I think we remain too self-interested, too self-serving, to make good on our presumed role as the assigned inheritors of the earth.  Our lust for power, our assumption of a degree of wisdom we have not necessarily yet attained, the self-righteousness of our vanity and the greediness of our pride, are making a wreckage of all that complex and delicately arrayed splendor once everywhere to be found in the natural world.

I don't know that there's much wisdom to be shown in remarking generally upon the age in which I live.  It would probably be wiser of me to follow common practice and acknowledge that it's only the future which can give any true perspective, any real hope of understanding, to the past.  The human condition is such that our ability to perceive who and what we are, as well as who and what we may become, remains inextricably interwoven with the times in which we live:  I can't pretend to be objective and probably shouldn't set myself up as judge.  Yet it seems to me impossible to deny that we are less able now than ever before to state with any certainty what hope there is for tomorrow.  Having suffered during the course of recent history two World Wars, the Holocaust, social and political revolutions too numerous to count, the threat of nuclear devastation, the increasingly frantic pace of our technological advancements, and pollution of such magnitude that for nature, this is already a time of devastation, it's difficult not to fall prey to the belief that we are ushering in an era of potentially very bleak consequences.  "What the hell happened?" may well turn out to be the only question left for future generations to ask.

We live, it seems to me, in an increasingly caustic world, a world in which corruption has become so all pervasive as to seem like an inescapable (and therefore acceptable) condition of our existence, our resignation in the face of it an unavoidable (and therefore blameless) response.  This is a world in which the most flagrant waste of money and resources exists side by side with whole populations of people living in the most wretched destitution.  It's a world in which more animals are now becoming extinct than has occurred since the extinction of the dinosaurs, in which pollution has grown so extensive that there are many who believe the damage caused by it is already beyond repair.  It's a world where political ideologies are used as an excuse for massacring the innocent, while religions of love and forgiveness have become a mere front for bigotry and hate.  A world in which people have come to believe that the best way to fight against the atrocities of terrorism is to adopt the same modes of attitude and behavior that they have vowed to defeat.  It's a world where whole countries are governed by nothing more nor less than monetary gain, its individual members being held captive to the dictates of corporate interests.  A world in which people gone berserk with the anger and despair of their own captivity sometimes commit mass murder as a means of retribution, shooting down whomever their tortured minds cause them to perceive to be the enemy or simply firing at random into crowds of complete strangers – an act so heinous as to almost defy belief, yet one which occurs with such frequency now as to almost border on the commonplace.

How have we come to such a pass?  Was there some better course we might once have chosen to follow?  Perhaps.  Then again, perhaps not.  We are partly what we choose to be, and partly we are what the world makes us become.  Many people today feel they have no choice but to consent, as a general condition placed on their existence, to the gradual corruption of their desire for a more enlightened, humane, and evolved society in which to live, but they do so only because they find themselves unable to recognize from what source that corruption springs, or feel themselves to be incapacitated in their ability to fight against that corruption even when its source has been correctly identified.  When the systems we invent to assist us in our governance become so deeply habituated to our minds that it is no longer possible to envision alternative possibilities, we may find that the scope of our individual potential has been correspondingly diminished – and with that diminishment, so diminishes our ability to control the destinies of our own lives.

As for me, I am, as said, one who prefers his own company to the company of others; I seek now only to complete the process of becoming impervious within my selected solitude.  I wonder about the world; I wonder about myself.  But not too much – never too much.  There seems little point, for there is little enough that I can do to change either.  Instead, I watch.  I wait and I watch, just to see, to see . . .