The low sunlight, streaming in from a clear cerulean late winter sky, resembles perfectly the sunlight of my childhood dreams, and as I stand at my window, marvelling at the brilliance of the whitewashed wall of my neighbour’s house on the other side of the street, I realise with a sense of alarm and, perhaps, panic that nothing can ever be all right. Everything must forever be wrong, and I do not understand why. The sunlight is not all right, my not going to the park in 1963 is not all right, my endless dark dreams are not all right, that long summer days always end, is not all right. It is as if the whole of creation has only ever been offered to other people, and never to me. Creation has got a tear on its page, and it can never be mended, and I will never be unaware of its disfigurement.
Certainly, in all this there is a distaste of transience. That all things must pass is a fact that cannot be denied, and resistance to it seems foolish and petulant, and the opposite of the sort of wisdom I have pursued all my life. Of course, transience is required for life to occur at all, for anything to happen in the first place, for anything to change into something else. A completely static universe would resemble a painting in which everything is fixed just as it is for all eternity. Nothing could happen, not even any thoughts that nothing is happening. So wishing for the suspension of transience is irrational. Perhaps I crave a comic-book superpower to bend transience to my will, making happen exactly what I want to happen, to control my own destiny and perhaps even the destiny of the world. But such megalomania is even more distasteful than the transience over which it seeks power.
Anatomy of Despair 