Fear of the unknown

Just another regular morning. I woke up with a pessimistic view this morning. Maybe it’s because of the book I stayed up late reading last night. It’s a genius novel that thoroughly evoked and disturbed my deepest feelings; I swear I feel my heart racing when I’m reading it.

It’s powerful, sensational and magnetic. Last night, I started reading at 10 pm and kept turning the pages and couldn’t stop regardless of how sleepy I felt, until 1 am.

So this morning, I woke up with a slightly desperate heart, I couldn’t even go back to reading the novel. Part of me doesn’t want it to be over, because it’s so exceptional and it touches me like nothing has before. Another part of me doesn’t want to get back to reading because the last I read was depressing and hopeless and obviously, the story is going down in that path.

Why did this story touch me so much? It reminds of the effect Albert Camus brought on me with his brilliant ‘L’étranger’. It’s said that the characters of a book we read affect us when we see resemblance between them and ourselves. So which character in this magnificent novel is the one I relate to?

This book is a love story, but from my viewpoint, I think it’s more about nationality and identity. The main character who happens to be a painter, who lost his arm in war, falls in the love of a lady 25 years younger than him. They were both immigrants in Paris. And the painter had and everlasting love for his homeland, that was suffering after war. I believe that the painter’s love for the girl was nothing but a love for his country, he was trying to identify himself through her, and with her he restored a great passion for his hometown. By loving her, the artist was trying to gain his country back, and maybe did he even fall in love with her mostly because she was from that place, because she spoke his dialect, because she wore traditional jewelry and had the traits of women in his country.

Are men united to their homelands? Why do you love a place so much while it’s just a piece of land with men-made structures?

Maybe is it the memories associated with the place that attach us to it; growing up, discovering the world, childhood friends and experiences…

Maybe men hold on to their childhood memories because these memories keep them alive, because they’re simply scared of death and profanity. Because those memories remind them of when they were kids with simple minds and simple dreams, no worries or cares, and a great lack of knowledge that made them happy, fearless creatures. And the more you know, the more you lose hope, the more you come close to your end.

Maybe the human race is stupid after all, and not as brilliant as claimed, stupid for letting feelings interfere with the brain work of creation and making.

And maybe, we’re ignorant after all, no matter how much knowledge we acquire in life, we know nothing about death, we ignore everything about what scares us most with its ambiguity and darkness.

We are programmed by our psychologies, and our actions are controlled by our subconscious mind. We’re not creatures of will in the end; we’re just slaves to our fear of the unknown.