Fruits (short story)
By Luke Labern
I
Sow
Bastards.
The lot of you.
But I include myself in that; I am one of you, and together we are all bastards. It is precisely because I am one of you that I know how awful the rest of you are: though I don’t subscribe to that nonsense that ‘all people are equal’, I do know that we all have the same faults. Or, at least, there are some faults that all people have. What are they? The very things people acknowledge, but never change, or perhaps more nefariously the things some people refuse to acknowledge.
Laziness. Unoriginality. Delusion.
This is what I can’t stand. And like I said, it’s because I am all of these things; I embody these things. For the first twenty years of my life, I was sure that I was different. I knew that I was destined for great things: how could I not be? I was smarter than all of those around me. I caught on to things quicker. When a hoop was produced for me to jump through—you better believe I jumped through it. And not only that, I smiled as I jumped through it. In that moment, I experienced bliss. I looked at the face of whomever it was that held the hoop—usually a teacher, or someone in power—and in that moment, I looked into their eyes. I was searching for a ‘well done’; a look of appreciation. I thought I got it, or at least I used to when I was very young. But, intelligent man that I was, I also saw something deeper there. More troubling. I didn’t realise it at the time, probably because I had been taught to do what I was told, but I could see that there was a reproach in those eyes.
As I now understand much too well, it was a look of sadness.
In the look of that authority figure, who had set the task so nonchalantly—whether it be a test, an equation or a question—was that look of knowing. They knew that, as able as I was, there was really nothing more for me to do. I was so able. Too able. And this was all they had for me: a silly little hoop to jump through.
Yet I didn’t know that at the time. I would complete my jump, land on the other side, brush myself down and carry onto the next thing. Perhaps another little hoop—never greater than the first—but usually nothing. That was it; the day was done. I now realise that those hoops were put there not only to purposefully waste my time, but they were there to satiate my ambition… without encouraging it. Certainly, it’s easy to trick the ambitious man (no matter how intelligent he is) if you make him feel as if he is achieving something, even though he is not. All one has to do is paint their small achievement as a small step on the path to success, when in reality you divert him away altogether. The nature of time is such that each day feels incredibly unimportant: no one really knows how they achieve anything great, for there is no way for human consciousness to expand past the day. Indeed, we become so tired that we need sleep at the end of every day. We are able only to plan ahead, roughly, and hope that have chosen the right path in our blindness. We feel much more comfortable looking back at the past precisely because it’s not something we are able to change.
Look how bitter I am. As I said, though, I wasn’t bitter at first. I was hopeful, and confident, even inspired. I would jump through hoop after hoop, through all the layers of education necessary—even the supposedly optional higher education, despite the fact that the things I wanted to do were closed off to a man who did not have a degree in his hand—until I reached the grand age of twenty-one. It was at this point that, at the height of my powers, I realised I was really exhausted.
But why? I had felt that it had been so easy: how, or why, was it that I felt as though I could handle nothing more? Perhaps it is because I realised that my 'education' had not been designed to instil me with the tools necessary to achieve what I really wanted to, but instead had been designed to subtly teach me to accept the orders of those in power: to jump through these set of hoops and to be grateful for the wage I got at the end of it.
What I never learnt was how to become the one with the power.
I had never earned a penny in my life: I had refused to work because I wanted to focus on my education. That was the very activity that was to guarantee me success in later life—and here I was, two decades old and feeling completely exhausted. I felt undermined: where had my energy gone? It had been spent on these little tasks; these hoops. I realised very quickly, after a short burst of euphoria, that the very activity that was supposed to have strengthened me had crushed me.
My body was not stronger for having jumped through hoops: my knees were arthritic, my ligaments were on the point of tearing and my bones would creak all through the night.
I was twenty-one, but I felt sixty.
I had put in enough work to deserve my retirement—but I was only supposed to be starting upon the work.
Needless to say, I wasn’t up for it. I hadn’t earned a penny yet, let alone a pound, but I wasn’t going to start at the bottom and work my way up. I wasn’t at the bottom: I had been at the top of my class the entire time. And I had gotten there through talent, but mostly through hard work.
I knew immediately what I would do. I was intelligent enough to see the state of things: I had been born into the world without choice, and had been brought up largely without a decision. Of course I was thankful to be literate, and to have benefitted from the culture in which I had been immersed—but was I then really beholden to that society? Was there anyone in particular that I owed something to? My parents were the logical choice: I treated them very well; as well as I could do. I was a focused, a ‘driven’ individual, and for that reason an anti-social one—but I gave my parents what joy I had. Apart from them, however, I could not find any one person that I owed anything to: the state was not a person. I had broken no laws, and had in fact aided my peers wherever possible: was that no aiding the state?
What more did they want from me?
I addressed these questions to myself, but of course they were really rhetorical: there was no one asking anything of me. It appeared as though it was my decision to leave.
What tempted me the most was the issue of money. I was an ambitious man, indeed—but when I reflected on the way things were, I started to look within and found that what I really wanted was the fruits of my labour. I wanted to be in control of my life. Nothing more, nothing less. Yet to work for someone else would be to lose control in doing what someone else told me to (despite any reservations I had) and also losing control in the form of putting money into the pockets of my bosses. And why? Precisely because they were the authority.
I saw no way of manoeuvring without losing the dignity I had amassed. Make no mistake: those who work hard, even if they do not possess financial wealth, make up for it with great stores of dignity. Often, this lies just beneath the surface. They will gladly be told what to do, will accept commands from above (despite there being no justification for it whatsoever) and will take pay cuts without question—but attempt to step on their dignity in any way that does not involve money, and they will roar, and they will very likely crush you. And why? Because dignity is real: money is not.
Indeed, it was money that lay behind all of this. And I do not subscribe to the thesis that ‘money is the root of all evil’: for it was the very thing that gave these people the opportunity to become powerful. It was simply that they did not make the most of their opportunity. Their education had been too successful: they felt that they were one of those to whom life happened—when the reality was that all it took to become powerful was the belief that life was something they could control.
And I do not think ‘power’ is the problem; certainly, there is nothing morally off about it. All I wanted was power: the power to control my own life. If I wanted to work, I wanted the chance to work: if I didn’t, then I shouldn’t have to.
Money, however, took this away from me. Aged twenty-one, at the great turning point of my life, I realised that the freedom I had always assumed was mine—the one I acquired at birth—had been taken from me, piece-by-piece. What did I need to do to regain it? Earn money. With each pound I saved, I would be clawing back the chance at freedom: if I spent it, I would be spending my freedom. And then I would have to earn it back again.
If I wanted to travel, I needed money. If I wanted to enter a new country, or sail, I would have to purchase a passport and a ticket. There would be no building my own boat. The wood I might need was not mine to have; the tools would have to be bought; the places I wished to sail to would ask me for my purpose of visit.
As I write this now, I see the answer clearly: I have made the right decision. The only decision I really could have made. But it took me thirty years to come to this decision: yes—I caved in.
My passion, my dignity, my sense of ambition—it all crumbled. I became scared. This, I believe, was due to an inherent weakness. I had learnt only to jump through hoops; at the first sign of hardship (let alone this major decision) I had nothing to offer. For a few brief weeks, I thought I had made a sensible decision in attempting to bridge the gap.
Yes, I thought; I will use my intelligence to earn lots of money. I will embrace business, I will become the man with power: I will come up with something that will earn me lots of money, and I will thus have earned lots of freedom.
Yet that quickly faded: pressure mounted on all sides. ‘Why haven’t you got a job yet?’ ‘How are you going to pay for rent?’ ‘Buy some new clothes; you’re not fitting in with the latest fashion.’ ‘You’ll never get a job if you wear that.’ The questions came from all: my parents, first and foremost, who, although intrigued about my plans to make lots of money, were wholly committed to the view that they—and thus, their offspring—were not one of the people who would ever be rich. The only ones who could become rich were special people, and neither they nor I were special. That was their thinking: and, though I resisted it at first, my hurt and my ambition eventually gave way, and I took a job.
I was indeed the lowest on the ladder; I hated it, I hated myself and I hated my past. All that I had dreamed of was now a waste: I would not be achieving it. Perhaps the cruellest realisation, and the one that really constructed a ceiling barring me from ever looking upwards again, was the fact that I had essentially doomed myself.
If I had only accepted my position in society in the first place, I might have found myself in a better place. If one is going to accept wages (and thus hand over the keys to their life), one might at least aim for the highest wages. I, on the other hand, had stuck fast to my simple, but apparently impossible, dream of controlling my life—and as a result, I had wasted my entire youth and was now stuck with the minimum wage.
What did intellect matter anyway, when those who ascribed to the way things were with good behaviour found themselves in a far better position?
So, as I turned twenty-two, I found myself a sensible job, with a sensible (that is, low) wage doing something I didn’t much like, but that I was more than able to do without thinking about it.
That, after all, was the key: thinking was the problem.
So I began the phase of my life in which I discovered I was more than capable of the very things I had always disliked in others: laziness, unoriginality and delusion. Yes: I was extremely lazy. Performing my job as I did, I became lazy in all areas of life. I would wake up each day, head to work as if on a conveyer belt, fit snugly into my work station and—at a brilliantly slow pace—would start the day’s work. It was almost as if when I arrived the last of my energy was converted into a sort of waking sleep. I was very likely the most productive worker, and yet I put in so little work that it’s almost embarrassing. The most amusing part of it all is that I was never called out. No, I was never praised—but I was never criticised, either. Laziness, however, is what I realise I exemplified: I paid little attention to my hygiene, my out-of-work interests (hitherto known as my life), my ambitions, my dreams—none of these seemed to exist anymore. When I finished work, I felt a refreshing sense of relief; it was almost a feeling of freedom. Of course, I did nothing with it: I returned home to watch television. Books, which I had always found great pleasure in, became irksome to me. My eyes were tired from my day’s work; television did the work for me. I didn’t even have to move my eyes from left to right. Television was so kind that it presented the moving pictures for me. And if I closed my eyes, it would talk to me. I missed nothing.
Soon enough, the few hours that comprised my evening (or my free time) quickly passed and I had to get some sleep—otherwise I wouldn’t be able to perform my job the next day. It now strikes me that I should have tried to go without sleep: I’m quite sure that I could have done my job in my sleep. I may even have died from sleep exhaustion; I wonder if they would have noticed a corpse sitting in my workstation instead of me.
Unoriginality, this second vice, was of course inevitable: what scope is there for originality if one is performing the same function day after day? I now realise that there were people possessed of some originality around me—the ones who leapt over me in the corporate ladder. Surely they must have done something original to do so; must have come up with a new idea, or saved some time. Perhaps they realised that certain jobs, or certain workers, were really a waste of time. Luckily, I always kept my job.
I can understand how this must be quite difficult to understand—how could I have gone from being truly ambitious to collapsing in the space of a year? It didn’t happen quite so fast, but it didn’t take long. There was something particularly stifling in the building where I worked, and in the city where I lived. The route I took each day seemed to become part of the job itself, passing as I did the endless stream of people who looked like me, dressed like me and had the same numb expression on their faces. Yes, it was part of the job—except I didn’t get paid for it. In fact, one of the last interesting thoughts I remember having (and this was over three decades ago) is that I was sure I had earned my wage within the first hour or two of arriving for work. I wondered where the last of my money went—to whom did it go? I’m still not quite sure; I always wondered why I didn’t profit from it. Perhaps this mystery is why I found myself becoming lazier and lazier and less original: nothing was really needed from me except the bare minimum.
The process was very quick, as I said.
I fell into a coma.
What do I mean by this word, 'coma'? Precisely the usual definition: I lapsed into unconsciousness, and I did not possess the power to awaken. It was, in that sense, quite different from sleep—although the few pieces of information I received from my senses represented a sort of nightmare to the young man who had grown up with such high hopes. I was not conscious; I really believe it is impossible to call oneself conscious if one does the same thing, day after day, whilst ignoring the worries that the deepest part of us acknowledge. The same things we all feel so passionate about in youth—the time when we are unblemished, and passionate, and not yet resigned to the way things are… the way things have to be.
When one finds oneself rising for the thousandth time, looking slightly worse for wear, a little more tired, a little less enthusiastic, to perform the same job, the same arbitrary function—safe only in the knowledge that, if one can keep their job, they will be performing that same function for many years to come (although the one great worry is if one will indeed keep their job)—yes, if one does all these things and no longer possess any recognition of their own ability to change these circumstances… then that person is not conscious. They have forsaken their own ability to control their lives. Though I am loathe to say anyone ever loses control of their life—for where else can our notion of responsibility come from?—it is in these tragic circumstances, which are so much a part of the way things are, that a human being comes closest to losing control. Though my memories of this period of my life (the great bulk of my life) are foggy, the images that appear to me are almost always of those who seemed utterly resigned to their fate. It is written in the faces of all who think that life is out of their control:
They laugh, they speak and they smile as though they were as free as the day they were born—but hiding behind these apparently genuine emotions is tiredness, a certain exhaustion. World-weariness. It is very likely that they have convinced themselves that they are indeed happy with their lot in life, but at certain times—usually in that moment between one emotion and the transition to the next—that they reveal something about not only themselves, but the world they live in. They immerse themselves in the comforts of the society in which they live, and though it really is true that they are free (at least free to succeed, and thus earn a little of their freedom), they do not believe it. And because they do not believe it, they are not.
And I was one of these people. My life now is almost over; my youth was stolen by ambitions that I did not fulfil. For so many years, I existed in a heightened state of awareness: ready and willing to fight off all those who said that I should fit in, and give up on my ambitions. I remained true to the identity I felt was not so much crafted, as really written for me—but when the time came to stand strong, the moment when I really had to decide what to do with my life… I succumbed. The notion of going without the comforts I had become reliant on, if only for a few months, seemed impossible. I now realise that if I had only been brave, and had relied on my wits, I could have made it: I could have been the man I dreamt of becoming.
But I took the job.
And, in a sense, I reprogrammed myself. I began to immerse myself more and more into the company. My ability to stand apart from the corporation, the set of documents and words, the pretence that was the entity for which I worked—all of that faded. Within months I would no longer wake up thinking of my life: I would think of what work I had to do. I did not spend my time dreaming of my future: I dreamt of how the company would evolve, and how I could increase the speed with which it grew. In under a year, my autonomy ceased to exist.
I struggle to trace it all: for it is impossible to relate the story of how one lost consciousness. I remember only what happened before, and where I am now, having escaped it: the great bulk of my life is indeed foreign to me.
What I do remember, precisely because it aroused and alerted me, if only briefly, to the change in myself, was the period in which I met and fell in love with my wife. Here, too, in abstract, I can only cringe: for I was determined never to marry. ‘Why would I do such a thing?’ I used to argue; ‘Why add a legal document to something already difficult to terminate?’ I said this not with bitterness, although I did feel some resentment towards the break-up of various earlier relationship (who doesn’t?), but quite simply; logically. ‘If the love between two people, or at least the bond they share, cannot keep them together, why should the paperwork of a marriage? If such a thing is necessary to scare them into staying together, they almost certainly should not do such a thing. Why make a split more acrimonious, more painful, more drawn-out? Why add the numbing artificiality of legal proceedings to the most painful emotional trauma one can experience?’
So, I married.
She was, of course, all for marriage. The lure of ‘the big day’ was something that had captivated her in the same way that my ambitions had captivated me in my youth. (Why I enabled hers whilst rejecting my own is something I think about often.) I put up little fight. Why argue? I became quite soft, almost immediately: I avoided conflict wherever possible. Though I slipped quite comfortably into my new existence, I felt as though a shell had been removed. I was exposed, and what formerly would have been easy to deal with became threatening. It certainly felt that way. Within months, I felt attached to this woman in the way one feels attached to their liver: I couldn’t do without her. And this, despite the fact that I certainly could have done without her. I had made it for twenty-three years without a wife, without a life partner, but at that point I felt quite scared of the world. I wanted the company. We painted it in the familiar modern colour: ‘I want someone to share my life with’. In reality, what I wanted was someone to tell me everything would be all right, and that I wouldn’t die, and that I wouldn’t fail, and that my anxieties would prove groundless.
After all, how can someone fail if they have no dreams?
We married. My co-workers attended. My parents were happy. I had a job, I had an income—not a big one—and I had a wife. (A big one.) We had a child shortly after. A little boy.
I had dreamt of parenthood for a few years, since my late teenage years. After experiencing the resistance to my ambition, I promised myself that I would bring up my children with the same passion and openness that defined me then. If I had had a little boy at around that time (overlooking the issues I might have had finding the money to feed and raise him properly), I think I would have instilled precisely that outlook in him. But, given that I was frightened, and crushed, and obedient, I raised a child who grew up to be confused, standing in a strange relationship to his father.
I wondered about the boy. Did he respect me? I think he did, at times—for the perceived strength and authority I possessed. This hurt the most precisely because he likely saw the tiny fragments of my ambition and passion for life, but he never got to see me when I was at my height. When I was uncorrupted.
I did what I could. The one thing that cannot be said against me is that I mistreated my child. I provided him with everything that a child could need. I was far from rich, but I was not poor. He had all the toys, all the entertainment, all the comforts that I supposed he would want.
What I realise now is that simply providing food and money for a child isn’t what’s required. That is the bare minimum. What a child needs to really prosper is care; sensitive and flexible parenting. Support. Encouragement. Inspiration. They deserve not only an example of someone who can hold down a job—as I did—but of someone who can change the world. They must be provided with a model of someone who really lives, of someone who is able to conquer life and bend it to their will. If children are provided only with models of those to whom life happens, they will very likely grow into similar people. I now realise that because I was too frightened to attempt to make good on my former dreams, I inadvertently underlined to my child that he shouldn’t—or couldn’t—either. By becoming the everyman when I was really capable of much more, I was the living embodiment of what I had so feared in my early years: I was a shell of a man, a man to whom life happened.
How could my boy not pick up on this model? One’s parents are the inescapable influence upon them. The more one tries to resist their influence, the more one is influenced.
How I brought up my child, I really do not know. It is something I hoped to forget, and it is something I really have forgotten. My child was a joy to me, however. On returning home from particularly brutal days of work, days which stirred up feelings of anger in me that might almost have been called the flickers of an awakening consciousness, my child soothed me. When I returned home and saw him, nothing else seemed to matter.
That was my life for the following eighteen years.
He grew; I decayed.
What seemed like his first birthday was really his tenth. Then came the rapid years of expansion: the three years following his tenth birthday were the same in quantity, but who can measure such a change in quality? His voice broke. His body began changing. His attitude metamorphosed. He began to see the world for what it was, without the mist of childhood. He began to criticise it, to note the very obvious flaws that I could no longer see. It crushed me to see that; I had to hide. I hid away from him, but more than that, I hid away from myself. I let him do what he had to do. Sometimes I left out books that I thought he should read as if I had been reading them in the hope that he would. I know that he took a couple and assimilated them into his ever-growing library (two small shelves with philosophical books and novels) and into his ever-growing mind.
We spoke, a little, but I held firm to my weakness. I tried not to pour too much pessimism upon him, but I certainly didn’t actively encourage him. As the years passed, phrases escaped his lips of the kind that evocatively lit up emotions in me.
One day I heard him say ‘I want to change the world.’
I entered a deep depression after that: I realised that I would have to embrace the man I had become. The more my son grew into the person I had been, and the more he became enlivened and inspired by his own youth and energy, the more I felt my age, my exhaustion and my failures.
Aged eighteen, he left for university.
By this time, however, my wife and I had had another child—a little girl. It was at this point that I began to realise that my life would be nothing but a series of repeats from this point onwards. There was nothing new to be added. Only when I was a young man did I ever feel that life held much in store for me; now I realised that, having reared one child, I was simply going to do the same thing once again. The difference this time was that I was indeed, a little wiser—but I was still more tired. I wasn’t frightened; I was comfortable. What energy the children gained seemed to have been taken directly from my wife and I. I was glad for my son to leave. I once again felt like my life had been written for me, that I wasn’t responsible for it. I didn’t even feel responsible for the children. The births of these children really felt as though something life prescribed to me. It felt at all times like I was simply reacting against it.
And so the girl grew. She was not so much ambitious, as beautiful; the comparisons between myself and her were minimal. Certainly, there was not so much pain as with my boy. However, by this point I was really a generation apart. At all times I condescended to her. There was no status of equality: she was younger than me, and she was wholly my creation. The boy had reminded me of myself in my youth; she reminded me of my solely of my self now.
So we carried on—and there is really nothing I can describe out of the ordinary. There were birthdays, arguments, presents; affection, surprise, boredom. All in all, everything felt just like it should. We were a family. Nothing distinguished us, for better or worse. We were friends with those on our streets; my wife was interested in helping out with the local town council. I stuck to my job; I stayed with the very same company I joined at the beginning. During my tenure, there were three managing directors.
It looked just as if mine was the sort of life one thinks about when thinking of the generic human existence of our time. Wife, children, job. Not spectacular. Not abominable. A man, living. All seemed as if it would continue indefinitely, until some tragedy would befall us. I had a sneaking feeling, every birthday, that it would be my last. That cancer would sneak up and end me; that I would go, and that would be that. Never having made an impact.
Then I regained consciousness.
II
Reap
I woke up and found myself alive. I possessed a mind, and the means to change everything around me. Yet I also found myself with baggage: a life. Experiences. A wife, and a child in the house. I looked at my skin and saw that it was not taut; it was wrinkled, and scarred, and tired. Somehow, I felt energetic. My only connection with this body, with its dark circles and its creaking bones, was the fact that it was where my mind was housed. I was tethered to it. I had no idea how I had it, nor how it had accrued all these various imperfections. It was faded and fading, certainly, but I didn’t care. I was finally in possession of it. I felt as though I had awoken from a dream. Certainly, I had vague memories of all this body had been through, but my mind had nothing to do with it. I had been a passenger, locked-in to a journey I had had no control over.
Stunned, I looked at the meat lying next to me. She was old too. I admit that I did feel something towards her: although I felt, quite rightly, that it was kind of me to lie next to her, it was kind of her to lie next to me also. Really, these human meat machines are really quite something to maintain—I learnt that very quickly. It was a lot of effort; to volunteer to care and help maintain another (not to mention a child, with its even more pressing demands) was an incredible undertaking.
I felt a rumbling in my stomach—and what a large stomach it was!—and made my way around the structure I realised was my house. It was far smaller than it should have been. For someone that had spent thirty years of their life working, I mean. I felt sick of it within an hour, but I knew that I would never be returning—so I went to see my little girl. I inadvertently woke her, but quickly hushed her and put her back to sleep. Perhaps it’s best that her last memory of me will be blurred and cast in the light of the half-waking, half-dreaming state in which we enter into the world each morning. That’s how I felt about the past thirty years of my life had spent; though I had woken up now, I couldn’t adopt this child. She wasn’t mine: she was born to the body that had unthinkingly—and unintentionally—created her several years ago. I had to deal with my own life now: there would be no wife and child there, no money, no bills. Just self-control.
And so I left.
Do I regret leaving them? I can honestly say that I do not. The little girl confuses me, I admit that much—but the woman? No. I gave her so many years that it’s only right that I take what remains. Besides, she is welcome to spend the rest of hers however she wants. I don’t know why anyone would have been attracted to the automaton I had become; what stimulating conversation, what inspiration, what company did she receive from that entity? I’m sure she’s doing much better now. But, if I’m being completely honest, it’s got nothing to do with me: I look after my own interests—she looks after her own.
If everyone took responsibility for themselves—totally, completely, without flinching—then everyone would be well taken of.
So it is that I have put that into practise. As it is, I can only perform that operation on myself. And I have no desire to force anyone else to do anything. I have no words for those who seek power, who seek to rule—how dare they attempt to control the lives of others, even prying into the very depths of their privacy and ruling what substances they can take, what they can say, what they must do with their lives? Is it really the case that these people are in such control of their lives that they have energy spare? No, of course not: to control and look after oneself is a full-time occupation. I left to seek precisely that occupation.
I knew that, if caught, I would be dragged back. I knew there would even be violence involved. I thus escaped somewhere that I assumed I would never be found. I wanted to go somewhere without money, without rule, without society. Indeed, I am located within what is known within the British Isles—and I know that someone in power, if they are lucky enough to read this, will think that I am in their land. But it is not their land:
The fruits of the earth belong to no one.
I do not claim to own the space wherein I subsist—wherein I live, having asked no one to come into existence. I am merely an animal. An amoral, apathetic, isolated animal. And I want the space to exist. I do not want to have to pay for it; I do not want to have to work for it. I exist, and that is that. I will not give anyone extra. As I said, I am thankful to have been improved by the culture into which I was brought. I am most thankful to be able to read and write. But I have given the bulk of my life to that society, and I truly feel that it has taken more from me than it has given to me. I have not been seriously ill: I have not benefitted from the health care I have received. I have not received handouts. I ate meat; I paid for it, though I could—and now have—hunted the meat myself. But this is all trivial. The equation is very simple: what the society has undeniably given me is the ability to make the most of my rationality. What it has taken from me is precisely all that I can give. My mind has been cultivated so as to make me a more productive worker, and in that respect I have been cultivated efficiently: I give much more to the society than I would otherwise have been able to.
Yes: I have been harvested.
I have been farmed, and now, at my age, it is safe to say that I have been consumed. The best of me is not only in the past; it is woven into the very fabric of the society I have left behind.
I realise now that the decision is really very simple: either one hands in their freedom for the comforts society can give them, or they forgo those comforts for their full freedom.
Well, I have done the former, and now I am doing the latter.
Of all the things I could say about the way I now live—the simplicity, the beauty, the way my life feels complete—I still find myself affected by my previous errors. And not the errors I made legally or 'morally'. No, what torments me is the mistake I made in handing over the keys to my life, in trading in my ambition and passion for laziness, unoriginality and delusion.
It was lazy of me to follow the route I was told to follow.
It was unoriginal to do what I was told.
I was deluded to think that I could ever escape who I really was.
For I am that ambitious man. Even through my coma, I remained that man: only, I didn’t act upon my ambitions. The weight of the ties and obligations I found myself burdened with made me afraid to take the chance. My memories of that time, of what I am forced to call my life, become more vivid every day. Each day I spend alone, in full control, I reflect more thoroughly. I see the way life is, and how it can be. If only I hadn’t been distracted. If only I hadn’t given in. If only I could have seen that, though things were not easy, they were simple. I allowed myself to feel that life was more complex than it really was—and yet, I was capable of leading the most complex life imaginable. For that it what it was: numbing oneself to the point where one really believes they are one of the masses is a very complex process.
I woke up, however. And realised that behind the clothes, the various numbers attached to me, behind the paperwork that apparently composed the entirety of my identity, there the truth remained. A naked animal. And, now that I have stripped away everything arbitrary, I am in tune with that animal.
That being said, however, I am a wounded animal.
One cannot simply go through what I went through and remain content or confident. This is my natural habitat, I’m sure of it—but my body is accustomed to the old one. My body longs for the drugs that I had become reliant on. It longs for the range of foods I wallowed in. These physical effects are something, but they are nothing compared to the psychological effects.
Though I am free, I am scarred. I do not long for that woman, and really the child doesn’t interest me much either. I mourn for myself. I want that time back. I want my youth back. If I could do this with the energy and flexibility of my youth and young adulthood, I cannot imagine what I could have accomplished. I know that I am making excuses, but my body is tired. I am unused to physical exertion.
Yes, there is only one option left. But in this great act, I will secure the control I have really always had once and for all. After this, there will be no more asking, no more imposition, no more to be done: I will have made my decision, and that will be that. I didn’t ask to be brought into this world, but I chose to continue to exist.
No one can take away my right to exist except from me. And I have made my decision. Whoever you are, I offer you the great piece of advice that I have discovered in my life. Via brilliant and then wasted potential, via many years of unconsciousness and a brief final flash of freedom, realise one thing and one thing only as demonstrated by my life:
The fruits of the earth belong to no one.
And that includes you.
A Short Story,
Published 06 March 2014
Published 06 March 2014