Sunday, September 25, 2005

I Think in This Sleep.

We think of illness as a temporary thing, a brief time spent before returning to some ideal of physical well-being. But I realize as I write through this swollen grogginess, struggling to hear my thoughts in the thick wetness of my aching feverish brain, that life forever veers from the ideal. When I am no longer sick, I may be tired or hungry, sleepy or depressed. I wait to be something that I will never be and think that only then will I be what I am. My body cries out to deaden itself to its own existence, but I sit awake and write because I fear that if I give in to the impossibility of living while ill, I must give in to the impossibility of living. Whence come our ideals if we have no experience of them? I think we glimpse them briefly. Perfection is not separate from reality; it is an element of it. The beautiful mingles daily with the shabby and the low. I think I have seen perfection. I think I have heard it, tasted it. I think in this sleep which overtakes me now in the depth of my fatigue there is something of the ideal.

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