Not long ago I came to the conclusion that life is a bet, a gamble of some sort. A daily bet where we pin our hopes on tomorrow bringing, even by the slightest margin, just enough motivation to keep playing. You know, much like Camus’ absurdist dilemma of the coffee-suicide dichotomy. This blog is simply my wager placed on tomorrow.
I long sought a philosophical/ideological outlook to make sense of the life before me. I later realized what I was truly seeking was a methodology instead; a means not for an end but for itself. Whatever I write here follows that approach: writing as a way of being, not as a way of arriving. Put differently, “To hold a pen is to be at war” says one Enlightenment philosopher. I write here not to win, but to wage war.
Every now on then some thoughts cross my mind and I usually let them slip away. With Notes from Blank Page, I intend to hold onto and build upon them. These thoughts usually concern my interpretations of social phenomena around me, my commentary on world affairs, some pseudo-philosophic deductions and my impressions from my travels.
There is a great saying attested to Saint Augustine: The word is a book and those who do not traveI only read one page. Seeing the futility of life, I resolved to travel as much as possible, not in search of meaning but in defiance of its absence. The idea to ‘go there’ germinated when I was working as a research assistant on Iraq. Not because I watch CNN International frequently. Each week, I would read tons of articles on political, economic and social developments in Iraq. But once I set foot in Iraq, I saw the disconnect between the reality on the ground and the analyses produced in far away white-collar offices. There I deemed you can never truly know a place from afar. Experience offers more than what can be captured in hundreds of pages.
Dostoyevsky had his Notes from Underground. Baldwin had his Notes of a Native Son. And yours truly has his Notes from Blank Page.
Notes from Blank Page 