Tunis - Never have things become as clear and comprehensible to us as they are today. Indeed, everything today is out in the open.
What belongs to the individual does not necessarily belong to society, nor should it. Never should it have been an obligation for us, lovers of truth, beauty and freedom, to buy everything society that is selling. Society, be it the family, the community, or the people around us, seems to have taken everything from us, including our dreams and ambitions, and left nothing to us except the words we are writing. Society has confiscated our dreams. Society has confiscated our ambitions. Everything is clear today. It is certainly clear because even those who we thought were sharing our dreams and ambitions have lost them, and then proclaimed that he who thinks differently is wrong and good for nothing.
True, we are wrong and good for nothing. For if we are not, what meaning is there or will there be to protesting against something called society while we are waiting for it to hold us by the arms? As time goes on, we will forget about our dreams and our ambitions. For if we are not wrong and good for nothing, what meaning is there or will be to thinking about home, innocence and place?
I am afraid that if I go on this way, I will be plunged into an endless desert of questions and nothing will quench my thirst for true answers except the One who is above (greatest and exalted be He). But so long as questioning is a key to knowledge, I will go on asking questions and in so doing I will be thinking for myself. No human being will ever think for me and pretend to offer me answers to my questions.
And if it happens that my questions are bad ones, at least my answers, however futile they may be, will offer me the platform I need to go on thinking for myself and asking more questions. I must find the courage to think for myself and follow my ambitions and dreams to their quixotic and - maybe -- tragic ending. For to make an end, T. S. Eliot rightly said, is to make a beginning. Here, also, is Plato in his Allegory of the Cave without critical intervention afterwards:
'And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them?' Let me close up this space of thought only to open it up again with this poem I entitle Ode to Love and Beauty. For life is a mystery. It goes on despite the enemies of it: the enemies of Truth. And if nobody holds the truth, they do not seem to understand. I will therefore continue to write for life and say that:
Having said what I said,
Having done what I did,
I will never hang my head in regret.
****
Alone in my agony,
alone in my dynasty,
I will stand still
And dig and have things to hammer out.
****
Shall I stop? Shall I thus wait and weep?
I weep, but not at this time,
In this place, when my words
Have turned without sense,
without platform, to feel pride
And swing aimlessly like birds.
O brothers and sisters of shared
Love and Beauty, keep working,
keep living, keep soaring… in silence.
Photo by Kaoutar Rouas
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