Divine Surveillance
144 words
Sometimes I wonder if all the technological options we have to escape our solitude— all the ways we can publish our thoughts or seemingly connect with friends or strangers— may have pushed us to the point of being unable to think or say anything unless we believe someone is listening.
Then again it was only after I stopped believing that God was always watching me that I began to understand what privacy was, and how privacy created solitude, and how a sufficiently deep solitude created thoughts that could bloom into stories, but if you’re secluded enough to invent stories, then your thoughts eventually begin to examine themselves, to examine existence itself, a philosophical vortex that could be alleviated, immediately and somewhat permanently, by believing entirely in the existence of God.
Oh, solitude, the very best thing on earth, and solitude, to hell with it.
The above essay is 144 words, a part of a series explained over here.
“For let it go how it will, he said, God speaks in the least of creatures. The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice. The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work. I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life. Is that right? Aye.”
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
I love how this piece raises the question of who we are ultimately addressing through interiority: the self that it constructs; the other that ratifies the boundary between self and world; the consciousness that is both of us and somehow, always, outside and beyond the limitations of the self.