Friday, March 04, 2005
(12:06 AM) | Anonymous:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: L'édition sans Adam
As Adam is in Seattle, either being heralded for his provocative work or stoned for his heretical work, the duty of confession falls upon me.
I confess that I am afraid. Sometime today people will be sitting around a table, looking at some things I have written, some things other people have written about me, and they will pass the best judgment they can from these fragments. Sometime this weekend I'll find out if I was chosen by Villanova for a fellowship, and I'm scared that I won't have the luck to pull it off. Though I am certainly afraid I don't have what it takes to do philosophy, a profanely sacred task in my opinion, I'm not worried about them noticing my inabilities. I'm more concerned by the shear randomness of it, the pure chance that graduate committees have to operate on. I'm afraid I won't be able to do what I love.
I'm afraid of what the future holds. That my marriage will one day fail due to my morose personality. That I will be admitted to a graduate program and, rather than becoming more serious, become lazy. That after I earn a PhD I won't be able to find a job, or teach kids who are open to something other than the conservative ideology that is slowly becoming the norm in America. That I will become a comfortable academic, or worse, an armchair revolutionary, instead of actually learning what a revolution might look like. That I'll end up being wrong about this whole God thing, this whole Communism thing, that my life will end sometime in the future and looking back I will have seen a life of apathos. I'm afraid I will never be able to face the Eternal Return and affirm it.
Perhaps the most dangerous part of this confession is confessing that I have always been afraid. When I was a little boy I was afraid of tornado's and nuclear bombs. When I was a teenager I was afraid of condemnation and being alone, but also afraid that people would know that I felt alone and was truly alone. I'm afraid I will never be able to shake fear and until I starting sleeping with someone else in bed, I always pulled the covers over my head.
Strangely, I never fear confessions.
