Even the most dense and opaque acquaintance transforms, at moments, into a window of shocking clarity and rainbow radiance.
There are friends who remain with us for hours, unclouded, as panes of gleaming, translucent glass, fragile in their clarity. It is these people, whether we are bound up with them in passing for a few weeks, or able to cling to their society for months and years who make us feel that friendship is desirable, that solitude is unbearable. When we look away, back to the cold expanse of empty spaces and closed faces, where a man is a solid mass and not a kingdom of transparent adventure, we are lost, and disappointed, and afraid. Poverty stalks us in streets where richness blossomed. The reaction to the sensation of clear, easy freedom, is a sense of hopeless constraint, and this constraint is a weight tied to a drowning man, forcing our heads beneath the water. An infant cannot live without air after that first, sputtering breath- the surprise of expanding lungs.
I am dying for a world without walls or ceilings- standing in my room I stretch my arms to their farthest height and long to feel miles of empty space whirling above them. In solitude, I curse gravity. Something in me is buoyant, and crying out to leave the floor, to laugh at treetops from overhead, and streak past the clouds into the terrifying lostness of stars and circling planets.
To be free seems the most difficult thing in the world. Free, I hardly know from what, yet I feel suffocated, claustrophobic, pressed into the dark, heavy earth with an unyielding weight.
Music, beauty, poetry, the sky at every moment seem to be straining toward something. They make us feel like weeping, because they are all escape attempts, surging upward, and we can sense the barrier they strain against, like pitiful balloons striking a ceiling- my heart lifts, and swells, and almost bursts in me, yet I can go no further. I am matter, and weight, and feebly limited, and even lack the words, the voice, the power to express this intensity.
Something shouts to us 'Exult! Exult! Exult!', and our fragile exultation trails out into nothingness, is lost in empty space, swallowed up by a universe we cannot understand. And even as I fade into silence, feel the notes of each song and the letters of each word slipping away into a mysterious, far away rhythm of eternity, I cannot be silent.
Is this illusion then, what wind, and wide spaces, and the vulnerable, frighteningly beautiful glimpses a glass-like moment gives us into another human heart? Is it merely the highest pinnacle of reality, which leaves us longing, starving for more? Is it an echo, a reflection, of a reality we haven't found yet, can't reach, still dream of and strive toward relentlessly?
"The beauty or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things- the beauty, the memory of our own past- are a good image of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are NOT the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited." -C.S. Lewis
We all know as though by instinct, what it is to throw oneself in despair at an unyielding door. Every haunting glimpse of a window reminds me that I live behind walls, with walls before and behind, a maze of walls within walls, in which I am both victim and Minotaur, hunter and hunted, justice and courage, guilt and terror.
I feel as reckless and wild as April, eager to throw off every unwanted hamper. I want to dance with bare legs, and feel the wind sweeping over arms and face, tearing at my hair. I want to sing so that fine clear notes echo back to me from the rocky cliffs of slate to the blue, blue heavens. I want to lie in impossible stillness, unbreathing, on a low rock wall and look at explosive white pannacles of pear blossom against an infinite black night sky, lit to warm golden wonder by an ordinary street light while the crescent moon, a curl of liquid silver, swims in the corner of my vision.
I want to place my hands on the shoulders of a stranger in the street, and look into his eyes and past his face, until I understand the strangeness of it- that this warm, living unit of motion beside me is animated by a mystery invisible even to the most brilliant scientists, the most searching innovations of technology. We can trace, and graph, and measure the footsteps of an energy, a force we cannot comprehend. In history, they used to imagine that the soul could be found and weighed, and they were wrong. And after that, they began to believe that a thing which cannot be measured and weighed is nothing at all, and they were more wrong still. For it is only by this invisible, untraceable element that we exist as ourselves, that we are aware of the thing we cannot see. Enormous, and luminous it is, filling our vision and obscuring it, demanding to be seen and acknowledged, yet flitting just out of sight with diaphanous elfin speed. I look in my mirror, and I do not see myself, only an indication that my self is looking for my self, and it cannot find it- can't see past a plain face, masses of hair, and anxious blue eyes to discover the truth it is looking for- the iron ephemeral spirit which gives meaning to the face, to every face.
We are lost in one small place- tightly boxed in, yet wandering without cease.
I can only think that somehow, in a paradox I am blind to, this frantic thirst for freedom, and the infinite weight which stands between us are saying in two different languages, each only half understood, that to be free does not mean what I feel that it must, that in constraint is found a liberty of a different sort, that when my arms cease pulsing in their desire to be wings, perhaps only then will I discover the full magic of arms. That restlessness is only a poor, flimsy substitute for rest.
