a late night confession

I sat listening to a recording of Vivaldi’s Seasons with Joshua Bell playing the lead violin when an owl outside my window interrupted my revery by hooting nature's midnight chimes. I had intended to write during the magic hours following the last stroke of twelve, but utterly transported by Joshua’s arpeggio’s during his performance of Winter, I wisely chose to not disturb the warmth stirring in my breast by attempting to capture my feelings with anything so pedestrian as mere words.

Is it a crime in such moments to choose being over action? Sometimes the artist revels in setting down her brush, the photographer in capping his lens or the poet by returning her quill to the ink well. Wordlessly contemplating the nature of awe brings its own intangible rewards.

But a voice, still in the midnight calm whispered Cogito ergo sum - I think therefore I am, and wrecked it all. Does the purring kitten think such thoughts when I stroke the bottom of her chin or the dog desperately wagging its tail wonder at the coincidence of his implausible existence?

The now silent stranger who reclined ghostlike on my bed puffed on his pipe and regarded me suspiciously in the murky late night gloom. I began to feel as if I were the spectre who had invaded his home rather than he entering mine uninvited and unwelcomed.

That evening I had retreated to my office to work on a story idea. I told my wife I had the writing bug and would be late to bed, but after a few hours of scribbling a sentence or two and then scratching them out several times over, I elected to treat myself to a few of my favorite Baroque classics and leave off writing for a more propitious time and place. Turns out I did not have the bug at all, just the desire to be alone.

Squinting at my framed Army discharge certificate on the wall, the stranger commented, I see you served in the honorable profession of arms. A common soldier?

Officer, I answered quietly.

Leaning toward the certificate he looked a little closer and longer. Hmmm, a Major. No longer?

I no longer practice the art. But in my dreams, though an old man, I still wear the uniform and bear the accoutrements of war. I expect that I shall to the end of my days, my voice nightly carrying over the din of rifle fire, a man who in some missing piece of my soul remains cursed to forever command.

When you dream thusly, do you believe in the reality that you yet remain an officer, leading other soldiers?

I do.

And yet you are deceived?

I sighed and whispered, Just so.

The stranger nodded knowingly. I have often dreamt that I sat in the comfort of my room, clothed in my dressing gown and smoking my pipe much as I do now and yet was also deceived. Though this seem true, I must nevertheless remember that I am a man in habit of sleeping and representing to myself these same things and sometimes even others less probable.

But in this present moment I look at thee with eyes wide awake; this head which I move to and fro sleeps not; my hand moves with express purpose when I pull this pipe from my lips. When I awaken from those representations created by my mind, I know with every certainty that I had dreamt and now am awake and alert.

In spite of my knowledge of physics, astronomy and mathematics, however, I have for a long time believed that there is a God who is all powerful, and who created me, such as I am. Do you believe, Major, that God is your maker?

His words struck a distant chord of memory. I had read René Descartes's Meditations when I studied philosophy at university and remembered with some vividity his reasoning regarding the deceptive nature of dreams. Had I unwittingly fallen asleep and now dreamt that his ghost paid me a midnight visit?

I stared wordlessly at the figure resting upon my daybed before finally remembering and answering his question.

Science has learned much since you and Isaac Newton invented modernity. It’s much harder to embrace an eternally existing Being who created the world ex nihilo - out of nothing or that an equally incomprehensible explosion of light formed the universe from eternal preexisting matter. I fear the impermanence of this material universe and the improbability of a non-material starting point confounds rational logic.

But after speaking my doubts out loud, waves of terror rolled across my goose pimpled flesh, my thinking grinding to a halt by the leap of faith that both God and Science demand. I experienced the desperate sense of my smallness in the face of a mystery so vast that it might never be known.

He gazed at me in the gloom for a long time, puffing on his pipe, and I was suddenly embarrassed by my unanticipated volubility.

In the following silence the moon finally set and other than the lit ash in Descartes's pipe and its soft glow on his lips, the room was dark as the grave. In that moment my loneliness struck me like a blow, my breath expelled from within me like a fist driven into my gut. My experience of consciousness was suddenly a mirror reflecting only inward, a gilded cage forever denying true knowledge of the life I have pretended to live.

And then I began to speak like a madman might. In my hubris, I thought I might lecture a man whose philosophy had helped shape the modern world. I talked for hours while my visitor did little more than puff upon his pipe, only occasionally removing it to cough or ask a short question.

As the beginnings of dawn started to gleam on the eastern horizon, my throat had grown almost too tender to speak further.

And yet, fool that I was, I finally managed to say what I had intended from the moment I had begun to babble when we two were essentially invisible in the night.

We don't see the world for what it is, we make it ... we create it, I whispered hoarsely, I think therefore I am is a trap, not evidence of existence. It is the cage of self. Even when our minds are free of disease we still only see and comprehend anything beyond ourselves with tremendous effort. We see life through a mirror darkly and always will.

But Descartes only smiled and tucked his pipe into a pocket before slowly fading away. And in that moment of aloneness, I felt desperately sad.

I have been a poet philosopher for most of my life, and what have I gained from it apart from pretended enlightenment? I write only to assuage my terrible need to be known by others, but do not read others in the manner that I truly wish to be read. I hear only my voice in the darkness of the night and see only my reflection in the light of day.

And when I finally discover the strength to walk away from writing in a feeble attempt to wrest myself free from the monotony of my own voice, what then?