Contemplations Of A Silent Dweller

It is my tragic fate to have been born a dweller. A lot of us go through so many things in common and yet it happened to be my curious luck to be someone who literally doubles over when something of consequence strikes.


I could not say that I lived a sheltered life as a kid although I was born a Catholic in a rather provincial community where everyone knows everyone else and where it was capital sin not to greet your neighbor good evening when meeting them in the street at dusk. In fact, you could say I was always running amuck with my friends and was breaking the rules as soon as they were established.

Yet nothing prepared me for the onslaught of ideas I was confronted with as I was coming of age. In college, I vowed to go to church every Sunday. I also read every night the Lord of Pardon booklet my mother gave me. It was supposed to protect me from danger. And yes, I did feel protected. That is, until one day, a girl wearing short shorts walked into my Philo I class and stood in front of us, looking excited about sharing something. She announced that her boyfriend gave her a present and she wanted to show it to us. She said it was an authentic little crystal ball which you could determine by striking with your fingernails or with a little metal stick. It would give a thin and high-pitched ring unlike fake ones that emit a hollow sound. She was cupping it with both hands so we could not see it. She asked to pass it around to everyone in class and to cup it with both hands like she did to make sure not to drop it. I was sitting at the back of the room that day so I was one of the last students to have the privilege of seeing it. From the start, I noticed everyone's giggles and whispers after getting a glimpse. I could hardly wait my turn. No sooner did my seatmate pass the "precious crystal" to me from her cupped hands than I realized we've been had. There was no crystal. Nothing! My seatmate said in a hushed voice, "What a sicko!" I thought to myself, if this was her brand of joke, it was far from funny. After the last of us "saw" it, she dismissed the class, teary-eyed in thanking us for having witnessed something really meaningful in her life.


When next we met, there was none of the hoopla of the first day in class. She seemed normal and proceeded to give us our syllabus. Our lesson for the day was the three kinds of concepts: fictitious, abstract, and empirical. An example of a fictitious concept is the unicorn. It is purely imaginary and does not exist. The concept of number, circle, infinity- these are examples of abstract ideas. Their extensions could not be found in the world but which we find useful in formal sciences like Mathematics, Geometry, and Logic. Empirical ideas are those that could be perceived by any of our five senses, like a chair, which we can see and touch, the existence of which we can prove or disprove. She then asked us, "So can I ask you one thing before you sleep tonight? Could you ponder whether for you, God is a fictitious, abstract, or empirical concept?"


This style was becoming routine to us when one day, a weird looking guy barged into the room and left us dumbfounded after claiming with such gusto, "my heart is merging with an infinite entity in the cosmos!" She showed up late but demanded to know whether we have read about Logical Positivism which posits that statements whose truth or falsity could not be proved are considered meaningless and devoid of cognitive content.


At one time, she told us a story about eating in a diner in the school's Shopping Center. It was packed with people in all walks of life. There was a group of nuns, a rugged looking guy, a mother with her kid, and a number of students...She was in line to order her food. When it was her turn, she asked in a not so small voice, "Manong, parang ang sarap ng itlog mo, pabili nga, yang malaki." The nuns looked her way, in an admonitory stare, as if to say there was a kid present and how dare her speak like that. The rugged guy laughed and said to himself (but in a voice everyone could hear),"yan ang gusto ko, mahilig sa malaking itlog!" Some giggled but others took no notice as if it was the most regular talk. At the end of the story,as usual, she asked if we had finished reading, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Language Games. She reminded us that the most common words in everyday conversations could spell a world of difference to different people, depending on the language games or forms of life they were raised in.


It was such that everyday, I came to look forward to the next tactic she would employ to get the point across. For the first time, in what I felt like a long grueling battle for academic survival, I was enjoying college.


So just like that, I had my world turned upside down... And I was never happier. I dropped Speech Communication altogether and took up Philosophy even without any intention of pursuing Law School, which to the majority of the student population was the only known reason for anyone to take it.


During this period, one could say that the rate of my learning was becoming inversely proportional to the rate my faith was dropping on a daily basis.


I saw my most cherished beliefs shatter into pieces like broken glass. I must have looked like a New Yorker staring incredulously at the ruins of the Twin Towers. I kept asking, “Where is that girl who once said, God I belong here, upon entering the chapel? Where is that girl whose heart overflows with emotion at singing, My hope is in you Lord!?" And Philo 172 (Philosophy of Religion) was much too neutral, nay, even atheistic in its leaning to have led me to a rediscovery of my belief.


There was, of course, Anne Rice. Interview, Lestat,Queen, Tale, and finally, Memnoch. Did I not reach a point of no return when Lestat bid us adieu in the fifth installment of The Vampire Chronicles? Do you know what anguish means when you're the one feeling it?


Vainly, I struggled with maniacal fervor to find my lost faith again. As Lestat would say, I was like a man who loses an arm or a leg and keeps insisting that he still feels pain where the arm or leg used to be. It was a self-righteous stage of denial I did not right away admit to myself, for did I not read the bible every night? Indeed, it came to a point where I would shudder at the sight of the cover of Interview with the Vampire. Work of the devil, I convinced myself. 

It was a long time before I came to terms with what I had become. It would not have come about had I not recollected this "moment of truth" as a child, my own personal "Age of Enlightenment".


When I was a kid, I used to sit on a make-shift hammock tied to a small tree in our yard. One twilight, as I suddenly looked up the fading sky, it dawned on me how small I was against the vastness of the world. Just a dot on a strip of land. I realized that I could die right then and there and the birds would go on flying in the horizon, making the sunset all the more magical and enchanting. I could just die and the world would continue to turn on its axis as if an Allena never once breathed its air. Of course, I could not have expected that the nameless despair I felt at that precise moment, the unfathomable grief that welled up in me would eventually shape the way I see the world because, by God, I was only nine years old!


So you see, I had an early propensity for non-belief. I had a vision of eternal abyss. To my consternation, it comforted me immensely- the knowledge that I did not lose a part of myself but that I had rediscovered it.


Just when it seemed impossible, there came a renewed vigor in my daily life. I pored through my readings like I did with To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. I had committed to heart the arguments for and against the existence of God, the meaning of knowledge, the principles of ethics and morality and so on.


It was my burning ambition to write my thoughts on these things in a novel much like Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. But I realized at once that you could not read Dostoevsky and still think you could write something of substance. So I am left to dwell on these thoughts...unable to fully expound on them, unable to abandon them. I am here, vacillating between the two lives I live.


The unexamined life is not worth living, says Socrates. Be that as it may, I could not bring the point home enough how utterly pathetic that I continue to occupy myself with ideas so passe. I could not move because these are the forces that drive me and it is only at home that these thoughts could be brought forward with the true confidence that I will be understood. The smallest pleasantries are such a burden that I willingly succumb to silence. In the outside world, I have no other choice but shut up. I feel outraged that these should still affect me to a paralyzing extent. In an era when people have long moved on to practical matters, and I guess,rightly so, I'm still groping and stumbling around the edges in the fabric of life.


A classmate I had reunited with in a previous company once told me, "so dinibdib mo talaga sya?!" In the UK, there is an expression for my answer. Spot on!