Secrets (*)(*)(*)(*) Chapter Seven

Now Tim could see through the eyes of the people he had maliciously hurt since last night and also throughout his life. He had no right, even though his right had been violated. Now he could turn away, walk away, or even die without trying to disenchant himself. His life, he realized, had been a great nothingness up to now. He thought of the pain, both physically and emotionally he was going through. He said to himself: "If I have to choose between nothingness I had had it for a long time and pain I have now, I choose the pain." He sighed. He was aware of his imminent death, but yet he knew that it was life that always would be victorious. He was beaten, he felt beaten, but not by people as he had thought before, but by the life which would go on after him.

Now it was time for him to stand for everlasting values, the values that throughout the history of mankind, all philosophers, educators, poets, writers, and... he stood for. Now it was time for him to forget hate and admire love, like the love he had for his son, like the love he had for Rosa, like the love he had for his books, like the love he had for his friendship with Jacob. For he knew after his death, the sun would still shine, and the flowers would still bloom, and the birds would still sing.

He repeated the word "love" in his speaking mind, unable to avoid the inwardly sensible enjoyment of his own freedom of any kind of restraint in his mental view. Nevertheless, a pain grabbed his heart. He was losing everything at the time he had come to appreciate them. It was too late. Things for him soon would be only a great nothingness that he had feared all his life. Everything was becoming dark, even the bright morning was changing to a dark night. He thought people inside perhaps wanted to save him; but he would be saved only by his death. But there, in his grave, he would not be able to exchange dreams; there would not be crowded streets, or the great vitality. Everything would be still. Was his life up to that point enough for all he wished now? He felt he needed to explore more of the human endeavor, there was no sense, it was not good anymore; it was too late!

Sitting there on the garden chair with the half eaten pearl still in his hand, not in his own home, but a friend's, he felt a force within him to admit that never before he had thought indispensably adequate necessity. He acknowledged to himself the fear he had had about the true, brave ideas, and the fundamental concepts of life; and how he had walked away from them all. He was not afraid anymore. Now in that morning of ending summer, that warm September day, his mind traveled from one subject to another.

He thought to himself that soon, perhaps he would be wasted physically. But that really did not bother him much. What was upsetting to him was the waste of his intellect, loss of his mind was the thing he would regret the most. His greatest fear was the disappearing of his mental activity. He had heard horror stories about the last stages of this disease. And that was why he was determined not to allow the doctors use his body as a guinea pig, and to fill him up with all different, new or old drugs. And that was why he was decisive to end his life before reaching to that stage of not functioning, especially mentally.

Now he was very much attentive to his innermost feelings. He thought about his days with Rosa. Many of them were wonderful- a connecting of widespread and disparate ideas. He admitted that he had accumulated much wisdom from her. That admission made him chastise himself for behaving so badly. He now knew that he had undermined the ideas, views, the rationality of others whether he found them tender, or he was confused or repulsive by them. This profound, yet bitter understanding made him even more puzzled.

To Be Continued