The Simplest Cause of Pain

Faced with the question of what kind of person I wanted to make myself, I looked to literature, at those characters so entrenched in fiction they show more truth than our actual selves. After much deliberation, I came to an impasse. On one pole lies Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, a man as driven, cool, and confident in manner as he is competent in intellect. He stands for empiricism, rationality and capitalism at its finest. Naturally, businessmen and engineer-types are attracted to him. He gets the job done. I’ve always adored Howard Roark. On the other hand lies Oscar Wilde’s creation, Dorian Gray, the new Galatea to an age-old Pygmalion -- or an effete dandy’s solution to an age of English propriety. Dorian Gray is sleek, cool, calm, admired, and confident. I'm careful to say "admired" and not "loved." Dorian Gray is, to say the least, the face of charisma -- the embodiment of youth and joy. Artists and dreamy, romantic-types are attracted to him, but then again, so is everyone. He represents society at its finest.

To be Roark is to be in control. Roark is pure production, and the master of his domain. The caveat of course is that the more and more a man becomes like Roark, the less spontaneous and creative his life becomes. He becomes entrenched in discipline and ritual. Eventually, he becomes what he desires most: a robot, an automaton that can get the job done with no cause for concern, worry, or error. No man wants to become that: to stand up, get the job done, sit back down, and do another. Any man that admits so is purely a masochist! No one is an assembly line. Where then is the sense of pride, and the joy in one's work? Of course, Ayn Rand portrayed Roark as a man on a mission and one driven by a fierce passion and intellect to move the world. What I think is the reality, however, is that the job gets done with or without his input, and the work gets tedious after some time. We’ll always want for something more.

A man hasn't lived until he's seen every bit of the world: each tower, each alleyway, and each street there is to cross. That's the way we’re meant to live. I’d want to be immersed in it: the big, beautiful, noisy, and hard-paved world. I want to be able to look in the eye and see that I've conquered it, seen every sight there is to see and experienced everything worth experiencing. I'd be filled with fright to do otherwise. Shear fear of missing something alone should be motivation enough. I know that one day, I too will be settled in my grave, and I will want to look back on my life at the very end and not have a regret for those things I never got to do. That's what drives me. That's what wakes me up in the morning, to climb ever higher and fall flat on my face crying, and to want to go up to a random stranger and hug every damn person I see.

I guess the problem is purely one of the heart and the intellect, or as Greeks saw it, of maintaining the delicate balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. What Roark stands for is Reason, and Dorian, sheer Passion. They’re opposite ends of the pole, two ways of living. Apollo, the Sun God, represents classical order and reason triumphing over the entropy of nature. In Apollo’s light, magnificent cities are built, wild pastures are tamed, and great statues are erected in tribute to the creative powers of man. Dionysus, the God of Wine, represents something entirely different. In Dionysus’s fleeting night; wild inhibitions are released, beasts are unharnessed, and secret pleasures come to fruition. To worship Dionysus is to give in.

As a person, Dorian Gray was neither born nor made. He is too artificial to have been born of man and woman, and too natural to have been contrived. He simply is. He is like Athena, springing in full armor from the head of Zeus, belonging neither to man nor woman, mother nor father. People see him like a nymph, in its insular sacred beauty. They want to possess him, or aspire to be him, or both; but little things get in the way. People are too shy, they never say the right things, don't have the right clothes, or don’t think they can compare to other men, or gods. To be Dorian Gray is to defy reality. People appreciate his style, his charisma, his immortality, and the way people gather around him like ants to honey; but his shallowness is to be mistrusted; and his lack of responsibility, abhorred. Someone who gave thought as much intensity as feeling would want more than that from life. He would be capable of so much more.

To move mountains, to make something useful, to believe that an Anybody can be a Somebody -- there’s the true source of pride. There’s the sense of validation. It’s all one big game at the end of the long haul. A person can’t long to possess one world, and have some of the other. It just doesn't work that way. Now, take Howard Roark and Dorian Gray for instance. Both were artists in their own right, and both tempted destruction. Everyone sought to destroy Howard Roark, for his spiritual vision and his disregard for appearances. Everyone accepted Dorian Gray, for his lack of a vision and complete immersion in appearances. Yet, he eventually destroyed himself. To live, in accordance with or despite one’s best self -- that is the big question, and the simplest cause of pain.