We live in a world of contradictions (that coexist within a singularity). These contradictions are birthed from further incomprehensible contradictions.
A person both does and doesn’t want to live.
Freedom chains itself.
Love is as selfish as it is selfless (James Joyce’s “love loves to love love”).
Good consumes evil until the two are inseparable.
The vastness of time is a formless emptiness at hand—a breeze that doesn’t touch you, and yet tears down everything that surrounds.
Everything is true and nothing is true.
As the folds of perspective increase, so do the contradictions. And human emotions form the basis of all duality—there is tyranny in pride and a crude hatred in the truest of love. Still, the biggest irony of all is the clueless human existence dwelling within idols of total unfamiliarity. It is like cats somehow landing (and surviving) in outer space and without much understanding of anything, deceiving themselves into normality.
Humans have always been victims of this staggering duality, stabbed by the subtle absurdity of everything. It is only natural in such maddeningly paradoxical world to embrace Completeness and Perfection—a Being free of all that torments us—an Eternity to hold on to, a consolation for our plagued, remorseful existence. From the ‘inhumanness’ of humans themselves to the ineffability of that which truly and only matters, one finds God in contradiction.
‘Contradiction’ thus gives rise to both the mundanity and richness of the world. This is precisely why irony—the art of contradiction—is the most sublime and impactful of all poetic devices in literature. It punctures through humanity and draws blood out of time.
It would be fair to say that human existence wouldn’t be possible without the contradiction of life.
Sualiha Khan
Class X
