As I walked up the hill, back to the fields and the bare moors, scent of marzipan rising from the verge, tar bubbling in the slight sunshine, I realised that I have forgotten to be happy. I have spent the week feeling so detached and so numb that I have forgotten the sheer beauty of consciousness.
Going back to that moment of realisation, back to the moment when I recognised that the weight of melancholy that fills my lethargic and unmotivated self is mainly of my own construction, it occurrs to me that pehaps I didn't fully comprehend Nietzsche this past year. When he explains nihilism as the inevitable meaningless of our lives, my original reaction was amusement. I now question whether it was my preoccupation with study that allowed me to find hilarity in this otherwise bleak statement. Something in me that was focussed on my work would not allow me to know the pesimism of Nietzsche's statement but only the ways in which it may be empowering to the human race. These past few days with no pressures and no commitments, I have come to speculate on the darker and deeper levels of meaning implicit in that statement. As each day stretched before me asking to be filled and yet repelling any plan, I found myself sinking deeper into the numbing knowledge of the uselessness of life.
So I see that although the stoic philosophers aimed for complete rational control and containment of emotion, there is a deeper place from which emotions spring; a place that we have no control over and that colours our interpretation of concepts and theories.
