With acute anticipation for a new literary adventure, I picked up Carlo Michelstaedter’s magnum opus — persuasion and rhetoric. I did expect from the titular profundity in its not so subtle indication towards ancient Aristotalean philosophy, that the text would be dense. It is. But it also reads like a stranger’s diary one might find inside a thrift store. The kind of experience where you find yourself wondering about the possibility that you might have met them at some point of your life because you feel like you could have written it instead. It is that personal! and I always fancy me some literature that is equivalent to having a conversation with my thoughts partly owing to thoughts’ inherent ability to multiply itself anchored in cartesian certainty— incessantly strjving towards its affinity for commingling into a polished version and mostly owing to obessive compulsive disorder… where were we?? yeah we are talking about Michelstaedter’s profound disdain towards established patterns engraved in the human syndrome and its authenticity or lack there of. The way we distribute “consciousness” into various aspects of our life is in negation to its very definition. We are not conscious as long as we keep distracting ourselves from the weight of existence. If consciousness is the absolute possession of the present moment, then dividing it into pieces for the sake of utility destroys its essence. What I mean is what we call consciousness is a an already established pattern to navigate the giant maze that life is. I am sitting here writing my thoughts about a book I am reading while simultaneously I also find my thoughts going back to other mental chores such as how am I going to plan tomorrow’s day. so my consciousness– my avidity to this instance is dissected by the haunts of future. This is the rhetoric. This is the spiritual dilemma of my existence narrated by Mihelstaedter.

” Nor is any life ever satisfied to live in any present, for insofar as it is life it continues, and it continues into the future to the degree that it lacks life. If it were to possess itself completely here and now and be in want of nothing–if it awaited nothing in the future–it would not continue: it would cease to be life “

in Carlo’s words, life is compared to a weight hanging from a hook where the weights life is its desire to the fall to the centre so that once it hits the centre and possesses itself completely it ceases to be a weight.

” But man wants from other things in a future time what he lacks in himself: the possession of his own self, and as he wants and is busied so with the future he escapes himself in every present.” “ What he wants is given within him, and wanting life he distances himself from himself: he does not know what he wants. His end is not his end, nor does he know why he does what he does: his activity is being passive, for he does not have himself as long as an irreducible, obscure hunger for life lives within him. “

Rhetoric is never an end in itself for it always seeks a shape in which it can manifest itself, acting as a stabilizer for our persistent vacillation— forming the ultimate narrative that our constant pursuit for the next thing in our life isn’t meaningless – rhetoric is the sweet talk we have with ourselves so that we can distract ourselves from the fact that we have rendered our lives off its actual meaning. We are always in want of the life that we are presently living.