A Cautionary Tale

There is no question about it: I am a willful, moody person who refuses to fit into society. Every so often I will display the liveliness of my intellect. When highly stimulated I can be entrancing, my mordant wit sparkles and I overwhelm everyone with the audacity and richness of my sometimes somber inspirations. But basically I am incurable, for I do not want to be cured; I care nothing for coordination and a place in the scheme of things. I love nothing but my freedom, my perpetual limbo status, and I prefer spending my whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy of the professional world and society and thus attaining peace. I care nothing for peace, have no regard for a place in the professional world, hardly mind reproof and isolation.

Certainly I am a most inconvenient and indigestible component in a society whose ideal is harmony and orderliness. But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestibility I am, in the midst of such a limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an admonition and warning, a spur to new bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd. And, to my mind, this is the very reason I am to be cherished. For I am a dynamic element, a small open window that looks out upon new prospects. Though I admit that most people do not value my precious gifts, my melancholy genius, my flickering intensity and acrobatic artistry. Rather, the majority of people see only my unreliability, my tendency to fritter away my talents, my lack of any discipline or sense of community. Indeed, most people perceive that I have no goals beyond egotistic enjoyment of my own overbred faculties. They see a person who resides mentally in a dream-ridden realm populated by fantasy and vain wishes.

Readers of this blog may have become acquainted with a frequent visitor, Shiv Reddy, who occasionally leaves comments. It puzzles me why this gifted young man, already overburdened with work, duties, and responsibilities, spends time reading and commenting on my posts. I suspect there is a measure of pity in Shiv's relationship to me. My imperiled and usually unhappy state appeals to Shiv's chivalric feelings. In me, a peculiar person for sure, I suspect that Shiv senses the features of a type. Shiv no doubt sees me as two things in one: embodiment of the finest gifts to be found in the solitary thinker, and at the same time a portent of the demoralization and downfall of those abilities. For Shiv I am both an ideal and a warning. I present a cautionary tale of what Shiv seeks to avoid: the tragedy of squandered talents and failed ambitions.