Escape.
We are always escaping from the realities that plagued our lives into fictions woven by the self-same hands that have caused the painful realities that pervade.
Hopes, dreams, imagination, daydreams - they are no less fictitious than the soap dramas we can enraptured by, the booker prize prose works we indulge in, the fantasies of comic alternatives, the impossibilities of wide screen dramas. Anything to escape. Even if it meant embracing someone else's life.
Religion, faith, belief are escapes from a monotonous, repetitive and cruel existence. It is the opiate of the lost, the forlorn, the clueless; the hordes who are unable to accept the existential condition of life or their seeming insignificance in what is really a small planet in a cosmos of possibilities.
Law, structure, legality, social systems: are testimonies to the chaos that is existence itself. These artificial institutions exist only because brewing beneath the superstructures of civility is the incessant threat of chaos. So we escape into illusions of order and repress the frenticism and primal disorder that is the condition of humanity.
Science: the paradigm of logic. It is an escape from senselessness. For we need to control that which we innately recognise is uncontrollable. Art serves as an escape from the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear that is inherent in the human condition.
Love.... "is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives." ~ Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Can we live life without escaping? To stare into the abyss of chaos and insanity and still stand in its presence living?
Can we stop running?
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