This is the novel I am currently working on. I wrote it twenty years ago. It is like visiting with an old friend to work on this. I’m not sure if it works yet but I am enjoying the visit.
Foreword
Nothing can be further from the truth, or, it could be the truth, the whole truth.
The more you live, the less life makes sense. Your mortality becomes apparent. You are going to die.
The only fact we know is that there are no facts.
Those were thoughts that readily come to mind as I contemplate my place in life.
As a youth, as a son, I used to toy with naïve philosophical meanderings.
I imagined that I might be drifting in a cage of infinite space, marooned in infinite darkness. I might be all that exists – a mind floating in infinite nothing. I was making the whole universe up.
I considered that it is conceivable that I am alone with my thoughts, with nothing to feed my mind.
I imagined the years rolling by, perhaps decades, perhaps epochs, and my mind seeking something to occupy itself. So, I created the universe out of my imagination. It’s not real.
Or maybe I was/am a prisoner deliberately abandoned and locked in a darkened cell. I might have been alone for decades in that dungeon, sensory deprived and now quite insane.
I imagined myself in my cell. I saw myself talking to my imaginary friends. The darkness, it is now light because that is what I wanted it to be. I create the world out of eddies in the random optic firing of my sightless eyes – out of the sequenced firing of my brain cells seeking to form patterns – out of my thoughts and dreams.
Maybe I create my brain out of my mind. A strange thought.
Are my dreams more real than reality?
I know, they were childish trains of thought, but, what is real? And where am I?
These thoughts are amusing to wander through. For who can say what reality really is?
My walls may be a universe thick with the darkness of eternity.
Are we minds in infinite nothing – in space – in a universe of nothing? Perhaps we all are?
If it were so, a person would have to do something. Ha, it would drive you out of your mind. So we are here. We accept it as reality.
Now, as a father, I live in reality. But I still question that reality.
I exist. I know that. What I am, where I came from, where I am going and the nature of myself, my world and reality, is open to conjecture.
Sometimes I am bored. In those moments one becomes aware of mortality, of the seconds of one’s life drifting past like sand in an egg-timer. The seconds left are diminishing.
In those times death seeks you out. One day I will cease to be.
In the sound of one mind snapping, can death bring an end to the universe? Can a mind fall if there is no one there to catch it?
Mortality is frightening.
We are cushioned from mortality by the bodies of our forebears. They shield us from the fury of the chaotic universe, from death, from meaninglessness, by virtue of their very existence. Death has to get through them to reach you.
Sometimes death sneaks round the edges and seizes an opportunity to grab you, but you can sneer in his face with the absurd confidence of youth. Death cannot touch you. You are young and vital. It will take the old first.
I am a father. I am also a son, a husband, an uncle, a cousin, and hold the latent potential to be a wise old grandfather. But that is of secondary importance for it is about being a father that is of vital importance.
Life brings perspective.
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