Sands of the Desert

I once had a friend in the fifth grade. I suppose he was the best friend I had at the time, though I wouldn’t say he was an intimate friend; yet we were friends nonetheless. I suppose that when I left public school in the sixth grade, he was still my “friend,” although we had already begun to drift apart. I never spoke to him again.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t see him again. One of the first faces I remember in high school was that of my “friend.” In the fifth grade, his parents had been divorced and he had some problems, but he lived with his mother and his grandparents in what seemed to be a relatively stable home. He had always been a little weird, but no weirder than I was (and still am); he was a little prone to overreaction at times, but other than that, he was a fairly good person.

In the blur of my first day at high school, it’s one of the few sights I can remember. I must have been standing; I probably remember what I saw right before I sat down, sitting on the left row of seats. Sitting behind my friend. Sitting behind a guy dressed up in a gray hoody, with headphones in his ears, moving and mumbling to music. Rap music.

I might have said something to him, some sort of friendly greeting, something said unwittingly before realizing who, what, I had spoken to. If he heard me, he didn’t say anything back; I’m glad he didn’t. I never had any classes with him and never ran into him, only spying him in hallways and on the bus, until he disappeared, and, to the best of my knowledge, he has never set foot in this school again. From what a true friend of mine later told me, when I casually inquired about the disappearance of our former classmate, was that he had been arrested, due to violence or something of that nature.

My former friend had family problems, and one could say—I wouldn’t know—that perhaps it is what set him on the war path of self-destruction. Yet I know from when he was my friend that there was no reason, no reason at all, for me to suspect that the innocent, clean-cut kid in the safe suburban world would, could, ever become the thug in the seat in front of me, bobbing to Rap music. Stop looking at what made people and start looking at what people made of themselves. Tim O’Brien might believe that people have an immortal, immutable thread of being, one which never becomes loose and unravels and falls away, lost into the abyss. But life, in reality, is as shifting and shapeless as the sands of the wind-swept desert. We are the wind.

What does it matter who I am now? What does it matter what I was an hour ago? Ten years ago? I can do anything I want right now. Anything. I just don’t want to. I find something I like in the way I am now, which is much like I was an hour ago, which is sort of what I was like ten years ago. I don’t change that much because I don’t want to change the things I like. People are only shaped by what’s around them if they want it to, if they will let their environment and peers do to them what they may. Many face the world by changing within; others are irresolute in the face of reason, ridicule, and death. Even the weak-willed, subject to the whim, are what they have become from their choices over their own destiny, in that they are indifferent to what becomes of them. Anyone can be as they want to be as an individual—what they take from their past is what they choose, and what they do in the future will define who they are.

Response to Kabunky:

When I did return to public high school, I was cognizant of the fact that people (regardless of the arguments we are making now) can change radically in four years. Some of the people I despised are now those whom I respect, and vise versa. Unfortunately, my former friend had gone onto, it seems, the path of darkness, but I would in no way characterize it as traumatic experience for me. As I said before, we were not intimate friends; I also did not leave public school with a favorable opinion of him, but for different reasons than why I might dislike him now. It was simply curious, sad, to see him change in the way he became, but, no worries, I was not hurt at all.

Define an intimate friend, you say? I suppose I define it relatively. My best friends today are much closer to my heart than my former friend was.

I’m a little surprised by your interpretation of the thing described by Plato that has been ascribed as the “soul.” You’re very eager to define it in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim idea of a soul and connect it to organized religion. If I have understood what I have been told of Plato’s philosophy, then organized religion has nothing to do with remembering what we have forgotten from the world of the Ideas (where we were once souls and only souls). Human reason is the key to the world of Ideas, if I understand it correctly. You seem to be condescending towards those who do not adopt and practice organized religion. Is that true, and why? Yes, it might seem that in order to accept Ideas, one must believe, in that they are unattainable yet still in “existence” (outside of time and space), that the Ideas are supernatural and that there must be a supernatural existence that we cannot comprehend. Why can’t a supernatural existence exist without any class of deity? What do people gain by participating in organized religion that helps them to know the world of Ideas? Even if organized religion is necessary to reach the world of Ideas, why be so morally condescending? [I marked up the specific text I had challenges to below.]

“I believe nowadays this spiritual dependence is lessening because in our generation less and less people attend church, so the spiritual realm to human comprehension is almost obsolete [Why?]. Since people seem to beleive less in their spirit and more about the physical, they really start to change like the sand as you say. I believe this is rather unfortunate of human beings to become this ignorant [Ignorance has a negative connotation. Why are non-believers or non-practitioners ignorant?], but it is ever so true.”

I find Plato’s philosophy to be appealing because it allows for the coexistence of my optimism (through the existence of perfect Ideas) and my skepticism (in the imperfection of Forms as both human ideas and as substance). You speak of the soul as unchanging. Perhaps it is. However, humans do not know their soul; they can only possess hazy recollections of what it knows, to be further clarified by human reason. Human reason, as I see it, causes change in the individual, and since all we know from our souls derives from human reason, we can fundamentally change ourselves through a change in our fundamental human reason. If our reasoning is correct, we will be elevated in all respects. If our reasoning is in error, then our faulty reasoning will be perilous to us. My former friend must have had faulty reasoning (unless, he, as Plato predicted, is the philosopher-king, the one who understands the world of the Ideas but is thus liable to persecution by those who do not understand).

First Response to The Teach:

Teach, I am still preparing my response to your first comment, though I expect to have it posted soon, no later than Wednesday. If and when you respond to this forthcoming response, what I would like to know from you is why you liked the part of my Kabunky response as you stated in your second comment. What made it any good? You see, to me it does not look to be very much different from my usual compositions--I usually have trouble self-evaluating my work. While I may address some flaws in my writing in this forthcoming response, I truly value your criticism, and if you have any thoughts on the failings of this post, I would be very happy to hear them.

P.S.

If you have the time, can you look at "The Art of Propaganda"? This is the succeeding POW (as we call them) to my previous rhetorical analysis (if it may be worthy of such a title...). I am particularly interested to know if you think there's been an improvement at all in this succession.