Rene Descartes, What Have You Done?

too old to die too young to live that man just sat there the way he always had: in his antique arm chair, arms at his side, brow wrinkled, tv blaring its white noise into his ears that had long gone deaf from the years of droning. every so often the train would go by the fifth story window as he sat motionless, unfazed by the vibrations. yes, he was quite oblivious to most things.

his friends and family equated it to years hidden in philosophy books reading about ontological danglers and schematisms. they say that those texts forced him to take very seriously the questions of consciousness, the questions of reality, the quest for the truth that edifies, the objective truth, the idea of Truth, the truthiness of it all.....they say that he was consumed by the journey that these questions draw one into, without even so much as the promise of a destination.

before he had assumed his catatonic state of existential crisis, he had filled his apartment with dark red candles, whose essence that he was so desperately trying to discover, had long since caked themselves to table tops, desks, chairs, mantles, books, porno magazines, even those old records he used to wear the needle out on.

it was all his friends could do to get him to eat. they managed to force him onto a liquid diet of milkshakes and apple sauce. sustenance for substance. "if you don't feed your body your mind will starve and then it will die", they'd say. they did not understand his odd metaphysical concerns. he just brushed them off as anti-intellectuals who didn't understand the real power of logos.

and so he devoted himself to to thought, to reason, to logic -- the way the great thinkers had. "hell, Kant never even left his home town....i've at least been to Europe", he thought. and if someone ever managed to scrape all of that wax off the forrest of books that had grown in his apartment they'd see the complete works of Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and even Nietzsche, for when he was feeling hip and rebellious. it was not just the books of the thinkers themselves that littered his rooms, but books on the books, and books on the books on the books, and articles in periodicals by professors on the books. yet, for whatever reason, it was the Meditations of Descartes that he could not escape. that same little pamphlet that bores every intro to philosophy student out of the major, and that every major and grad student thinks will never just disappear -- yes, that is the one that ultimately led to his downfall.

"it's all laid out like instructions. through introspective thought upon introspective thought, and reasoning ad infinite, I can come to know God; come to know myself!", he would think excitedly. oh how that cheeky little mantra "cogito ergo sum" played back and forth in his mind like a metronome to his thoughts. and he sat in that arm chair and meditated. his plan was to meditate on small concrete objects at first and graduate to larger more abstract concepts, following his mentor. he thought on the chair he sat in, the book he held in his hands, the rug, the toaster in the kitchen, the remote control, the television, the train outside his apartment, and the wax. he thought endlessly on the wax.

he became so consumed in his meditations that he eventually failed to notice anything else -- anything outside of his own mind. for him, there was nothing outside. the tv stayed on, blaring its white noise. the trains went by, shaking his apartment. the wax melted and melted until it had coated everything, and he sat in his chair and he thought.