Killing time

Just as when waiting at a bus stop or airport you might get out your novel or sudoku book or other such time-killer specifically brought along for its murderous purpose, so it often seems to me that all our goals, ambitions, achievements are just killing time between a birth and a death. At least, I myself am often overcome by this nauseating sense that in my own life this is the case. In general I find that in socially acceptable time-killing situations such as the departure lounge, I prefer to let time live, and to watch, to sit with an empty mind - my mind is invariably empty - and to do nothing. But when expanded to the scale of a lifetime, this same tendency manifests itself as a lack of ambition, abandonment of projects as pointless, a sense of futility and a wish just to watch the world pass without either attempting to engage with it or to make full use of the time by doing anything 'useful'.　

Whatever I choose to do, it is simply killing time until I die. This feeling, which is by no means constant in me but is I think interesting enough to write about and regular enough to be a problem, is perhaps the result of a particular line of philosophical reflection, or of my own peculiar psychological make-up, or an interaction between the two. If I was constantly driven, if I had a burning ambition or obsession which demanded fulfillment, then perhaps this feeling would never arise. I have occasionally felt driven, and I suspect it is precisely at moments when the fire goes out, when a ballooned ambition is pierced by real experience, when - to shift metaphors - you find yourself stranded centre stage with the mask (and until now you never suspected it was a mask) suddenly peeled off to reveal a faceless, scriptless nobody, and you shuffle offstage into the dim auditorium to sit and watch as your fellow actors continue to flap their mouths and roll out their roles - it is at these moments that you realize you can either remain in the empty (it is always empty) auditorium or fashion a new mask and carry on with the play.

If, having seen into the emptiness and absurdity of it all, you choose to re-enter the play, it is with a lost innocence, but also with the potential for a greater freedom to remake yourself, to alter the script, paint your face with gold or shit. Once you have had this experience of seeing the play for what it is, I wonder if it is ever possible to lose that perspective, to forget, to allow a mask to etch itself onto your nothingface again. I don't think it is possible for me. I can play the part, but I know that my attempts at impersonation are all pretense.