The Accidental Reader

.

.Apparently I should write a book rather than write posts for my blog, because someone might accidentally read my posts whereas no one will read my book.

Or at least that is how I interpreted what was said to me in a comment this morning:

“Stop writing up things like this on a blog; you can do whatever you want in a book. People might read it by mistake.”

Did this person – who called themselves ‘Hitman’ and filled in the ‘your blog’ section of their comment with ‘SaveTheWorld’ (that resulted in a 404 error message when examined), whose IP address located them in India (whether that was their actual location…?) – accidentally read my post and wished they hadn’t, blamed me for their mistake and decided that if I hadn’t written what I’d written and posted it on my blog (and didn’t have a blog) and had written it in a book instead, then they would not have accidentally read it and been perturbed by it (enough to comment on my blog post).

Or, far more likely, someone close to them read the post in question… by accident or perhaps deliberately… and then used my words it to make a point with them which they did not want to have made to them.
..

“Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name!” – Eugène Ionesco..

Apparently the way to ‘save the world’ requires for me to write a book instead of blogging. Or something like that. But what if I don’t want to save the world? Perhaps I don’t think it needs saving… from me or anyone else?..“Ideologies separate us.” ― Eugène Ionesco..

Growing up, as I did, with people who often said similar things to me when I expressed myself freely – thinking, perhaps erroneously, that such a thing was okay due to the fact that my body had a voice and my mind had things it wanted to say using that voice – I can appreciate the option offered to me. The option of still being allowed to express myself – just don’t do it where people will accidentally bump into it and maybe get bruised by the bump.

My parents were not as considerate, generous, or respectful of my right to express myself as this commenter is. As far as they were concerned I either said what they wanted to hear or I was to remain silent. However if I said what one parent wanted to hear, and pleased them because of it, it invariably displeased the other parent because it was not what they wanted to hear me say – which was the gist of the post – The Absent Father and The Devouring Mother – to which this commenter objected…

“I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding. If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.” – Eugène Ionesco..

I guess I should delete my blog and devote that time, and those words, to writing a book which no one but the writer will read… if the writer reads it, perhaps they won’t either and the world will be saved… from… what? Or who?..

“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” – Eugène Ionesco..

I’m not the least bit enlightened, perhaps I’m asking the wrong question?

Why am I quoting Eugène Ionesco?

Because… no, wait, the answer is irrelevant. Still… questions tempt us to answer them and get so wrapped up in the answer, in finding THE answer, that we forget the question and end up…..

“Nothing is mightier than our why, nothing stands above it, because in the end there is a why to which no answer is possible. In fact, from why to why, from one step to the next, you get to the end of things. And it is only by traveling from one why to the next, as far as the why that is unanswerable, that man attains the level of the creative principle, facing the infinite, equal to the infinite maybe. So long as he can answer the why he gets lost, he loses his way among things. ‘Why this?’ I answer, ‘because that,” and from one explanation to the next I reach the point where no explanation is satisfying, from one explanation to the next I reach zero, the absolute, where truth and falsehood are equivalent, become equal to one another, are identified with one another, cancel each other out in face of the absolute nothing. And so we can understand how all action, all choice, all history is justified, at the end of time, by a final cancelling-out. The why goes beyond everything. Nothing goes beyond the why, not even the nothing, because the nothing is not the explanation; when silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate why, that great why is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out, there is nothing more to make out.” – Eugène Ionesco..

Whatever!…?…!…?!?!..“I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.” – Eugène Ionesco..

I wish I was a cat…

“It isn’t what people think that’s important, but the reason they think what they think.” – Eugène Ionesco

..