Tags
Confession, Existentialism, Fraud, Literature, Sartre, Writing
Something just occured to me. I am living a lie. I am a fraud.
It occurred to me shortly after I started reading reading Sartre’s ‘Nausea’. This last is no lie, but it is terribly ironic, because it is a perfect example of what I am trying to confess with this post. Another fact is that I never really knew Sartre up to today. I was wandering into the bookstore and looking for Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs du mal’ in French because I thought it might be a good idea to teach myself French by reading the original with a French dictionary at hand. Me and my fancy ideas. Well I couldn’t find what I was looking for and I did find Sartre’s Nausea and of course I had heard of Existentialism and I knew I had to read Sartre sooner or later, so I bought it, not wanting to leave empty handed and because, frankly I was in need of a break from Musil’s ‘The man without qualities’ because in fact I expected it to be a better read.
But the above is all not very to the point, even though again terribly ironic. What occurred to me a short while ago, and what I need to confess because it shames me, is that I have fallen into my own trap. All these years, I can’t recollect when it started I thought of myself as an intellectual, bookish, literary, smart. But in fact, I just read a lot, much like the character the autodidact in Sartre’s novel, the only difference being that I don’t read in an alphabetical order.
I’ve read Nietzsche, I’ve read Plato, and Schopenhauer. I’ve read a load of great books. But ask me anything about them and how much would have stuck? I am hardly able to put two straight sentences together. Maybe more, maybe less, but that’s the point you see? I am just a reader. I have created this identity for myself with an expensive taste and the more I read, the more I discover that I am out of my depth. It took a few lines of Sartre to finally see the fraud I really am.
Now I can’t go back. I can stop reading, but I have so little left besides. Long ago I convinced myself I was too serious for partying, and when I used to in my student years I was never sober. I have equally convinced myself that almost all if not all of modern music and mainstream media is shallow crap I can’t really enjoy.
In fact I convinced myself of this idea that the whole experience of ‘being addicted to music’ which so many people now consider normal is actually a very recent invention and disease, a malady of people who can’t bare to be in silence with their thoughts.
And I don’t know what came first; my disdain for politics or reading Plato. I do know I love using Plato as my main argument against politics. Oh God, I am lost.
My choices have made me isolated and lonely.
The greatest joke is that I also convinced myself that I might have literary talent. I am a double fraud. I used reading as an excuse for not writing, I told myself I wasn’t ready. It’s another lie. I will never be ready.
How do I get out of this mess?
I wish I just had discovered some talent for manual labor early on. I remember I loved welding and cutting iron when I lived on the kibbutz. The sparks and the glow of hot Iron, the focus on the task at hand and the satisfaction when the job was done.
Why did I even study? Why get an university degree if it is perhaps rightly frowned upon?
I am glad I wrote this confession.