Where am I?

Trying to do in real life what I thought you could do in philosophy class: get to the bottom of things.

All my life I’ve eaten. Okay. Where does food come from? No, really. Why is it that every day a new food turns out to be lethal? (It’s tuna this week.) Why does the idea of a farm faintly haunt me? Or would the thousand different tasks of a single farm day be more degrading than 8 square hours in front of a screen?

All my life I’ve used stuff. Where does it come from? It doesn’t sprout merrily from the concrete. What are factories really like? Why doesn’t it strike me as odd that nothing seems to be made in my country anymore, where they’d at least have to pretend to pay a decent wage. Don’t worry, I’m told, I’m smart enough that I can easily soar above the herds and get a good job, maybe even start my own business.

What kind of work really produces something, instead of just shuffling papers or inventing another disposable?

Writing, perhaps? All my life I’ve wanted to write. Fine. What’s worth writing about? What of the terrifying possibility that I’ll waste your time like so many people waste mine? (Oops. Too late.

All my life I’ve alternately loved and hated Catholicism. Great. Where did it come from? As far as scholars can tell, from a certain guy in a certain place at a certain time. So was the guy God or not? Two fiercely incompatible ways of seeing the universe … which will it be?

Life is not a search for questions; if you shut up for half a minute, they crowd you. The questions are right here. Actually, so are the answers.

The problem? Locating the answers is like trying to find something in this office. Yet I’m confident that no matter how many times I’ve touched truth and then buried it under a pile of junk mail as I looked for those wretched keys, truth is still laying around somewhere. And (unlike my keys) if truth is a person, truth is hunting me down.

But I too must hunt.

“Why don’t they make more games out of the wind?” he asked in some excitement. “Kites are all right, but why should it only be kites? Why, I thought of three other games for a windy day while I was climbing that tree. Here’s one of them: you take a lot of pepper–”

“I think,” interposed Moon, with a sardonic mildness, “that your games are already sufficiently interesting. Are you, may I ask, a professional acrobat on a tour, or a traveling advertisement for Sunny Jim? How and why do you display all this energy for clearing walls and climbing trees in our melancholy, but at least rational, suburbs?”

The stranger, so far as so loud a person was capable of it, appeared to grow confidential.

“Well, it’s a trick of my own,” he confessed candidly. “I do it by having two legs.”

G.K. Chesterton, Manalive