Although I feel sometimes that the word ‘hesitation’ does not do justice to the rationale behind Hamlet’s delays and procrastinations. He wants only to be certain of the rightness of his actions, where to be wrong could have repercussions for his soul.
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Although I think, if I were to pursue that thought, I would find that Kundera, at least in that quote, tends toward the melancholy romanticism that I associate with the character of Hamlet. There is much art to be made from the substance of that prince, and his ruminative nature, but the answer to the riddle of him, if we can speak of such an ‘answer,’ is in the final moments of his tragedy’s final act, when decision, as opposed to hesitation, becomes his most salient trait.
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But then I hear Milan Kundera say, “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” And I pause to look around.
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“Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law,” says Immanuel Kant, and there is something appealing in that.
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Is there something disordered in my imagination, that I find myself recoiling from the thought of such fixity, as it pertains to our existence? When the avenues of reality might be so innumerable? When every moment of one’s life might be as a prism through which are refracted countless variations of that particular unfolding, though only one such variation seems to become actual? How does one reconcile one’s self to the singularity of one’s own history?
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We all are familiar with how our behavior can change when we become conscious that someone is watching us. This can be explained psychologically. But what physics seems also to bear out, and which seems less explicable, is the possibility that the very substance of reality, at least on the quantum level, can be described in one way, as opposed to another, only because the process of observing it fixes it, so to speak, in one of innumerable forms. And that, if left unobserved, it actually continues to exist (if even in potentiality alone) in these varied forms.
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One hears of the observer effect, for example, which states that the presence of an observer (be they a conscious human, or merely an instrument or device) can affect the phenomenon being observed.
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This seems especially true in quantum physics, which is the study of matter at its very smallest, or subatomic, scale.
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In other words, according to that premise, it is an incompleteness in our understanding, or our theory, that can cause us to mistake an ordinary phenomenon for a contradiction. Once we recognize what is occurring in terms of natural law, our understanding is complete, and we see that there is no contradiction. Which I don’t think prevents us from stating that, to a human observer, the material world seems to behave differently, depending on where one is located when one is observing.
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When we are driving along a highway in the desert in the heat of the afternoon, for instance, the mirage we might see up ahead is precisely that, a mirage. It looks like water, because of the way light bends when it encounters warm air. But we discover, as we get closer, that there is no water, and that we have experienced an optical illusion.
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Although, perhaps I should say it can appear to happen, which does not mean it necessarily does happen, at least not in the physical realm. For a premise of the natural sciences, which we would use to measure those phenomena that seem to us contradictory, is that reality is consistent, and thus cannot contradict itself.
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It can happen in the realm of ideas, which are abstract, but it can happen also in the physical realm, which is not abstract but is concrete.
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Which, ok, I’m not saying I have a first-rate intelligence (though I’m not denying it either, haha) but only that this is a scenario that happens.
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Which isn’t to say that my statements are untrue (though possibly ((though I hope not)) they are) but that truth can sometimes be paradoxical. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
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So often it seems to me that I’ll say one thing that, a moment later, I’ll find a way to contradict.
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In which case there is no channeling. For then there is no distinction between what one is, and what one is expressing.
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Although perhaps there are circumstances, also, where to become your anger, or become your grief, or whatever it is that you are feeling, is understandable. And not only understandable, but warranted.
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The anger that a person expresses, for instance, does not have to be an anger that defines them, but can be the anger that is called for, that is necessary, even. This is what is meant by ‘righteous anger.’
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Which isn’t to say you don’t respond to the weather, for you do, but that even in your response you do not identify yourself with your response, but you channel it through the silence that you find your identity in.
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Then you’ll be like the mountains and the trees and the oceans, which aren’t troubled by the weather, but are always themselves, singular and forthright and consistent.