Seem to me all the uses of this world.
HAMLET
An intermission from the daily doings/travel log: a jaunt into the dark, recesses, internal musings.
It can be a time to square oneself with the world, with oneself, even-- taking leave of the familiar and going off into the unknown. One might even see it as an opportunity to "begin again," cast off some of the things in oneself that are a little more nebulous, a little destructive, slightly broken. One has no past, the "other" has no experience of the self, it is a clean slate, or as close to that ideal as one is likely to get in life. But the trouble is, having mapped out all the realms of the earth and even some of the heavens, that energy of exploration, in our time, has no place new to turn; thus, it comports itself, returns to the old lands, and engages in a re-discovery of the various mothers of civilization.
Returning there, the observer finds again, and with more angst and stronger, these traits within himself which he wished to slough off. For one set of scales is exchanged a shinier lot; molting takes time and concentration, but the new coverings stay soft a pathetically small amount of hours or days. He discovers these "flaws" to be less trends than staples; in fact, perhaps, he finds that they are commodities, and out of the new world, into the old, they are the various things which will enable his survival. Now there is a circle present, and his hunger for exploration is dulled by the realization that he is, in fact, a rather pitiful, despise-able excuse for a man, and that the time or context really is of no importance. This idea is even more painful because he is sure that he knew this before embarking. So, the familiar gains momentum because he is drawn to nostalgia, and he begins to see the new world with old eyes: it is still ugly, yes; it still lacks a largeness he yearns for, he is still too big for its shoes. It begins to occur to him that there is no place he is home, but how to find the energy to repair that? It appears as if that endeavor, as the entire zig-zag of his life, will prove to be yet another cyclical structure, and one that he can predict without actually having to go out and do it. The people (mostly strangers) around him only reinforce these ideas: he can say much, and with a high percentage of accuracy, about their particular woes and triumphs, he wonders at how any of them actually live without his peculiar torpor, how they get through the day to day without small amounts of cyanide or large quantities of malt beverages. He disdains them, and yet-- they seem to have some secret he is missing. He makes various well-intentioned acts such as swearing off women, renting a house in the country for a month, quitting his good salaried job, and ignoring the bank credit in favor of discovering this secret of the living.
Still, he finds himself primarily to be "a creature driven and derided by vanity" and slowly abandons value-based decisions for a life in accord with his cold essence-- something that only increases his guilt for not living up to the character he always fancied himself to become.
Classic existential crisis, yes, but then we humans have come to believe so solidly in our own individuality that it seems, each time, again and again and again, to be new, original, and so it has power. No other is dealing with such weight, although at any given moment there are a plethora of examples of it to be found throughout the art around us. It still doesn't fail to move us to grand depths of depression and hedonism. So, why? What is so delicious and so obscure, this remote idea of a reconciliation?
