Welcome, My Pathetic

fallacy. It’s funny the way life gives us ample opportunity to understand its workings, and yet our ability to understand still falls short of the mark. The rain is coming down outside, falling in gentle sheets against the window. The sun has hidden its rays behind a wall of thunderhead clouds. People scamper to get out of the wet, and yet get pelted no matter what. Something in my head grays over, to match the grayness of the air. But it’s a busy grayness, not to be confused with fog. The rain is moving, the people are moving, the world is still moving: in a fog, all seems to stand still. This is locomotive grayness, a busy black-biled melancholia.

It’s not really raining though. As a matter of fact, the sun is warming my front porch up with its gentle rays and I watch people linger as they stroll—lingering together in the sunlight. Puffy clouds do their best to take up space in the sky, but their efforts are futile, so forceful is the gentle power of the sun—acting like a benevolent ruler, responding with kindness instead of aggression, wisdom instead of war, empathy instead of ignorance. You get to see all the colors in the world when the sunlight hits the street just right, and the air is comfortable enough to feel like you’re swimming in a luxurious lake in the middle of summer.

What’s interesting here is that they are both equally valid; meanwhile, they are both equally false. Their validity and truthfulness arise from their contemplation of a feeling. As a description of a metaphorically rainy mind, the first is completely valid, and if you are so happy the sun would be out even if it were raining, the second makes perfect sense. And yet, their falseness rings with the plain fact that I am sitting in my room and I have very thick curtains covering the window and I have no idea what the weather is outside. Fact and fiction are rolled into one.

It’s an unreal reality. This is probably one of the greatest mysteries of existence. The reality of our existence is, for the most part, undeniable, and the unreality of our experiences, of our emotions and the depth of effect these seem to have is almost incomprehensible. Do we know what love feels like? Yes and no. Do we know pain? Yes and no. Would we argue against the nos? Yes, but I know my defintion, and he knows his, and she hers, and she hers, and ad infinitum. I know my pain and you know yours. They are the same categorically, but different in reality. Unreal reality.

What’s funny is what lies beneath: a seeming universality of type of definition. Details differentiate specificity, but global concerns congeal. Studying history reveals universality of types. In the present we understand mainly the current moment, and its truth is based largely on feel. Future truth is best aided by the education of others to respect the past, present, and future, and search for understanding of the seemingly universal. The pathetic fallacy of me? My own sympathetic myth? My own empathetic erroneous belief? Love is out there begging to be understood…so real. But it’s possible to say that love is not real. Love is an idea about a feeling…a rather preposterous quagmire.

But bugger all that…I guess I’m an old romantic asshole at heart…and I really like the sunshine.