A Tussle to the Life
understanding physical reality as a younger brother fighting with the abstracted firstborn
May as well admit what my way of living has already long since confessed: I am content to live in the imagination. There’s an unreality I’ve cocooned myself in, and it has generally sufficed. But should it?
The missed world turns into a cousin of memory, imagined memory itself. Experiences, upon sober reflection, that were in fact within my physical reach, but were bypassed out of fear. Or was it just as I’ve described: a literally imagined sufficiency?
Youthful powers of spirit and body squaring off, with the intangible almost always coming out ahead. Advertised as this generation’s fight of the century, it certainly hasn’t lived up to its billing. Our poor senses, overmatched.
But here is how the balance of power plausibly changes: assume the soul’s immortality. Meaning, it is the firstborn. It has been the older brother in this fight the whole time - of course it’s had the advantage.
Oh world at my physical fingertips, I have begun to believe this: my experience, rather than my conception, of you is about to hit its own version of puberty. Soon, perhaps today, it will begin to hold its own in this tussle of brothers.