Diary of a Madman, XIV: Letter to a Friend

My Dearest Friend,

The summer heat is beginning to wane and the colors are the world are shifting. Hints of brown age are seeping into the once pastel-spring palette of my natural surroundings. As usual, Seoul is reluctant to change its season---it is a stubborn city. It grips onto the heat and sun that once baked its sidewalk and kept its subterranean underpinnings--those serpentine tunnels that snake beneath my feet. The cold weather is blowing in from all around.

With the changing season, I also espy a change within myself. It is a deep change, a recurring one. Deep inside my chest, ancient gears lodged beyond my senses are beginning to churn and rotate. Their seasonal hibernation now at an end, new emotions arise with a new season. I always believed that I was meant of the temperament of Fall.

The other day I went to the 한강 (Han River) to attend the annual fireworks festival. As I watched those glimmering lights in the sky, amongst that throng of people, I realized how narrow this world is. Allow me to explain:

We are limited to just one perspective, are we not? Each man, woman and child are subjected the boundaries of their optical, and otherwise cerebral, purview. Sitting with those people, all of us turned towards the flashing pops and brief explosions of the fireworks, I realized that amongst all that which exists on this earth that is sentient, there is a common property that must be entertained: one may only understand oneself.

How could this not be the case? I feel that such an assertion has all the mass and momentum of a rock slide of logical certainty.

To the extent in which one may understand anything at all, we may and can only know ourselves to the relative highest degree. I may see remorse in another man, but my ability to speculate on such a state do little but inch beyond estimation.

Without further sake of argument, I tender this, then, very humanitarian belief:
It is through our rather lachrymose inability to understand beyond our demarcation of flesh, that there is a new relationship between us! The limitations of our cognitive abilities present us the same challenges, to which, upon collusion, can respond in like-minded, collaborative solutions.

We are frail and weak alone. The might of man, however, is the relationships between us. The space that we mutually inhabit when we interact is a might that has seen centuries of imperial success. Alone, however, when we partition ourselves from the world and capitulate to the darkness of within our inherent solitude, we bear witness to the very roots of devastation.


I am, etc.-
Soohyun Alexander

MMVIII.X.V