Chalk-Zone

There are a lot of things we miss out on, maybe things that are supposed to be not noticed. It could be the many people that don't lie in your line of vision, that pass you by everyday on the road or in your apartment building or contained in the same school campus that steal your favourite nooks and corners and say the same things. How many people do you remember to notice on a daily basis? Your friends, sure, only the teachers of your specific subjects, maybe that guy that you've always found cute, that you look at coyly out of the corner of your eye to resassure yourself that he isn't flirting with someone else, maybe an enemy to make sure he's sitting alone or at least looks miserable. Maybe some details aren't reserved for us to see, or maybe we're all not capable of seeing them all. It was when rereading an old favourite, Born Confused (Tanuja Desai Hidier) and absentmindedly flipping through the first few pages that I came across this. A crisp page, unfamiliar to the fingertip, found itself just before the first chapter. A forgotten page, or rather an undiscovered one. It stared at me and blinked a little, and there they were, a few words that didn't roll off my tongue so easily and automatically like so many in the novel itself:

"Some souls one will never discover, unless one invents them first". - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathrustra

It made my mind go spiralling in too many ways, which gives away my complete inexperience when it comes to philosophy, since just any line might impress me. But it inexplicably held a truth to me, a truth which makes me so effusive and yes, shamelessly hypocritical, considering my last article condemned inspiration from any lyrics, a category which could expand itself to include quotes. How much of what we know is real, and how much do we in reality invent? Look at Nietzsche himself. Before I read his biography, he seemed like the ideal guy just for conjuring a statement like that, along with his other more well known theories of eternal recurrence and non-linear time. Automatically, I could close my eyes and draw some kind of a metaphysical outline of the philosopher- completely utopian and fictional. A figure almost completely invented in my very own head without knowing anything about him. It was when I read a bit that I learned he was a staunch misogynist, thanks to an awful sister who eventually broke up the one romance he ever had. You find the flaws in a believed-to-be perfect person and that figure gets slightly distorted, but the version of Nietzsche I'd like to admire is contained in the very words he wrote, and not in anything else about his life.

Isn't it something we all do? You'd ridicule me if I said the world isn't real but an illusion that you've convinced yourself to be living in, but don't we create distorted versions of everyone we know, so they can become more lovable or easier to hate? Aren't all those details that were never noticed, like a page stuck to another for the first fifty times a book was read, smeared over with little inventions? It's something so easily done, a figure drawn and blueprinted in your mind when you form a first impression. We're all architects, then, constantly drawing, filling in the void that hasn't been recorded by observation. Welding anything that emerges from imagination or daydreams or a bit of squeezed out fiction with what we know. Making it all up. Do we have the right to do that? Can I pick up a piece of chalk like that kid in that Cartoon Network show, and start drawing away my own world? To ramble on like this about a philosopher and butcher up something he said once upon a time with hardly any experience? I guess I'll have to keep inventing for you to discover what a fool I am.

-Amrita Mishra