The Wall Decides

It appears to me that man does not become himself by following his wishes, nor by pursuing those uncanny images of himself which desire continually sets before him, but by submitting himself to the necessity of his own peculiar nature.

He becomes himself by accepting what has been given to him, and by giving up his claim upon what has not been given: his incapacity, his limits, his contradictions, his gifts, his wounds, the peculiar burden of his temperament, and the demands that life places before him.

For man would gladly become everything except what he is. He dreams of another fate, another road, another life. He calls these dreams freedom, although often they are only flight from necessity. And because desire shows him what might be, he begins to believe that what he can imagine must therefore belong to him.

Oh, the great wall, the Holy One, the one that sweeps away the futures which man has secretly promised himself. The one before which desire falls silent, because no wish can command it to open.

I speak of this wall because I have seen it. Although it is difficult for me to put it into words, this difficulty does not come from a desire to adorn it with clever language, but from the impossibility of finding words equal to what was seen.

Therefore I speak in images, for there are things which man scarcely understands when they are laid bare before the intellect, yet recognizes immediately when they take on a living form. Look at what the ancients left us in images, myths, gods, monsters, crosses, serpents, circles, stars. They knew that certain truths cannot be carried by logos alone. They must be lived.

And so I return to what I saw.

I was on an island in the midst of a great sea. The terrifying water stretched outward without end, dark in its depths and bright where the sun touched it. Behind me lay the little ground upon which I had lived, and whenever I reached back toward it, I could grasp only the memory of earlier dreams, as though that land had already begun to withdraw from me. Before me opened another shore, green and luminous, as though life itself continued there without me.

I saw roads upon that land. I saw houses. I saw men and women dancing beneath the sun. I saw everything that my heart had promised me during the years when I still believed that longing was a kind of prophecy.

And between that shore and myself stood the wall.

It rose without gate, without crack, without beginning that I could find and without end that I could see. Yet it did not hide the land from me. The roads remained before my eyes. The houses remained. The men and women still danced. I could see the life continuing there in all its fullness, and this made the wall more terrible than darkness would have been.

At first I cursed the wall. Then I attempted to climb it. Then I invented philosophies explaining why the wall should not exist. And finally, after much suffering, I asked my soul: what is this torment? Do you really hate me that much?

"Damned one, why do you keep asking the wall to move? Why do you not ask what in you must change?

You must learn to accept your incapacity. You must cease treating every limit as an insult. You must stop demanding from me what you have not yet become capable of carrying.

The wall does not ask you to worship it. It asks you to recognize it. Prepare a meal for the wall. Give it a place at your table. Learn to live with the thing that denies you passage. For only when you cease wasting yourself against what cannot yet be moved will you discover what can still be built upon your own ground. Feed the wall with your resentment, your fantasies, your accusations, your secret belief that life owes you another fate. Give these things to it. Let it eat what is false in you. Then perhaps one day you will discover that the wall was never merely your enemy. It was the measure by which you were being made."

These words first appeared like nonsense, yet somehow felt like an arrow that always hits the weak spot. I did not understand them, so I went back to the wall. I cursed it again. I struck it again. I tried another road. I tried to become cleverer. I tried to become someone for whom the wall would make an exception.

Two weeks passed, I'm in the same torment, God, is this what hell is? To see human roads and be unable to walk it. To know what your heart wants and have no power to command it. To wake every damn day with hope only to find the wall standing exactly where you left it.

Funny, to say the least.

Funny.

Did I say funny?

I heard some laughs coming from the wall in front of me.

Is this the wall laughing?

Wow.

Then my soul spoke again:

"You still think the wall is mocking you."

I answered:

"What else should I think?"

My soul said:

"Prepare the meal."