St- Anna pedestrian tunnel, Antwerp 2013 |
These days, the
web world is moving at a fast pace. Except for the activities that need our
physical participation and presence, we can virtually do anything and obtain
all kinds of information and data on line via the internet connection. Our lives get
busier as we juggle our time between our responsibilities, commitments and web
activities.
Prague August '09 |
Perhaps it is
due to these inventions and
technology, I find that we are increasingly self-centred and often
uncompromising. There is such a fine line between self promoting and egotism.
In many ways, individualism is strived at and the self must be strengthened and
defined because your aptitude and
abilities must be promoted in order to get noticed and hired for that post or
the dream job you pine for. The web world holds the allure that it presents immense possibilities; what
is real and what is not is blurred. I believe that individuality is very much an illusion
whether in the physical world or the cyberspace. Whether you are a conformist
or a radical, we are all trapped in the world we think it is. As we are social
beings, we learn, we reinvent
ourselves and are quick to adapt to our surroundings and the constant changes
around us .
In his memoir Nothing to be Frightened of ,
Julian Barnes
talks about death and mortality after having witnessed his parents’ decline as
they advanced to their old age and
eventually passing. Here are some of the excerpts that strike a chord with me.
‘A question, and a paradox. Our
history has seen the gradual if bumpy rise of individualism: from the animal
herd, from the slave society, from the mass of uneducated units bossed by
priest and king, to looser groups in which the individual has greater rights
and freedoms-the right to pursue happiness, private thought, self- fulfillment,
self- indulgence. At the same time, as we throw off the rules of priest and
king, as science helps us understand the truer terms and conditions on which we
live, as our individualism expresses itself in grosser and more selfish ways (
what is freedom for if not for that?) , we also discover that this
individuality, or illusion of individuality, is less than we imagined. We
discover, to our surprise, that as Dawkins memorably puts it, we are “ survival
machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules
known as genes.” The paradox is that individualism-the triumph of free-
thinking artists and scientists-has led us to a state of self-awareness in
which we can now view ourselves as units of genetic obedience. My adolescent notion of self-construction-that vaguely,Englishly,existentialist ego-hope of autonomy-could not have been further from the truth....'
Chez Nous, a cafe in Penang |
Nothing To Be Frightened of
is peppered with humour even on
serious subjects such as faith, religious beliefs and death as Julian
Barnes takes us masterfully through the
insights of various writers
and his musings. Julian Barnes writes,
“ If I called myself an atheist
at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn’t because I have acquired
more knowledge in the meantime; just more awareness of ignorance. How can we be
sure that we know enough to know? As twenty-first century neo-Darwinian materialists,
convinced that the meaning and mechanism of life have only been fully clear
since the year 1859, we hold ourselves categorically wiser than those credulous
knee-benders who, a speck of time away, believe in divine purpose, an ordered
world, resurrection and a Last Judgement. But although we are more informed, we
are no more evolved, and certainly no more intelligent than them. What
convinces us that our knowledge is so final?”
Brilliant.
I love memoirs and this one sounds very good. Thank you. And yes, aren't we silly with all that we think we "should" have? I notice that too sometimes and don't like it.
ReplyDeleteHi Julie Thank you for reading. Time seems to be accelerating and it can be overwhelming when I find I have not done much about my writing. I try not to think about what I could have done or what I should have done.
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