The Watch

I look around me and the room has changed imperceptibly and overtly. There are elephants on thin legs lining the walls, the people around me have become giant insects, my watch melts and slowly drips from my wrist. A Dalinian dream? A Kafkaesque nightmare? The breeze of surrealism blows through my hair; an existential whirlwind captures my imagination. In the images of these two great creators, I see reflections of beautiful and insatiable imaginations, completely undisciplined, unbounded; yet full of the magic and power of the artists’ visions. These images are not as true as photographs, but they are a hundred times more honest. I, too, often find myself misrepresenting the world. In the midst of a truly dreary lecture I sometimes force wakefulness upon myself by images of what I am learning, and instead of seeing my teacher carrying on about the military campaigns of the Civil War, I see muskets blazing against raised flags. More often, I see my life as an adventure; romanticized, idealized, exhilarating. Instead of seeing a boring test of memory, I see a test of will; instead of a debate, I see a battle of wits; instead of seeing the photographic image of life, I see the existential and intoxicating war of man against Fate itself. In these images I am sometimes challenged by faceless opponents, sometimes I am climbing a mountain. Perhaps I am fighting a bull or jumping on rooftops. At times I question the benefits of reinventing the world to suit my fancy. It is true, of course, that everyone does this. Even the strictest of thinkers cannot avoid letting their own vision of the world show through in their works. Dali and Kafka are not exceptions, they are extremes. Why are we all so eager to get away from reality? I find that I, like many others, often don’t seem to fuly belong. But of course I do belong, this is my world as much as anyone else’s. I try to solve this contradiction between the perceived and the real by altering the world ever so slightly - a horse drawn carriage instead of a car, a prize winning essay rather than another homework assignment - so that it finds its place around me. A simple solution indeed. We do not change ourselves to fit the world, but change the world to fit within us. A simple act of wish fulfillment, and all is done. And, of course, to melt a watch with the mind is far better than to enslave the intellect within the watch like a genie in a bottle. Freedom to think requires only so little, and to adjust the world to one’s thought is ever more noble than adjusting thought to the world.