Sunday 15 December 2013

Free Will is an illusion. I finally concede.

I was lying on my chaise longue, wearing nothing but a flimsy peignoir, watching various appetites emerge and subside in my consciousness (a yen for a marmite and quince jelly muffin came and went, a desire to embrace proto-maoist Marxism tempted me for a while, a leaning towards graeco-roman sexual indulgence of the sort practised by the Emperor Tiberius on Capri flirted shamelessly with me), but, realising that the sense that I could choose to yield to or reject one or all of these was merely an illusion, I fell back on the chaise and lapsed back into my state of reverie. I sensed an enclosing mist come over me. Was I drowning? I struggled and strove with a sense of rising up through darkening waters towards a distant light. As I rose towards awareness, strangely and unaccountably, I found myself typing on a reconditioned Lenovo X61 Thinkpad laptop. I was typing this missive and I had a prescience that this was inevitable – it was always going to happen. There was no way in which I could not have found myself sitting, wearing a peignoir, on an empire style chaise longue, a laptop on my lap.....typing. I lamented my fate. Why me? Why had my genes, the accidents of history, a butterfly’s wing flapped in Japan in the Satsuma period, the eruption of Krakatoa all conspired to lead me to this? I felt I was a plaything of fate, a bagatelle to the whims of a blind and drunken watchmaker, a leaf driven hither and thither on a wanton wind. I lay back and wept hot tears of despair.

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