আবারটুকুই জীবন: বিশ

Walls can be divided. Floors can be divided. Ceilings can be divided. Pipes, drains, even the sound that drifts through those pipes and drains—all can be divided. When the light goes out, darkness can be shared, and cold too. When dawn comes, the dawn itself can be shared, greyness, silence. But what is truly necessary—if one allows that anything necessary exists at all—cannot be divided. Perhaps nothing is necessary. Yet if something is, it is not meant to be divided. At least the wall preserves that much.

Below there is a shop. It has been closed for a long time. Closed before you even came here. And yet the signboard still hangs. No one has taken it down. Taking it down requires a decision; in this city, the people capable of making decisions seem to have run out. The board has worn away over years of sun, rain, salt wind. Now the letters cannot be read. Yet once they meant something. They were someone's name, someone's dream. Someone once bought paint, stood beneath the sun dripping sweat, and wrote his own name with his own hand. Now it cannot be read. Wind, rain, time. Together they have erased it. The paint has cracked and fallen away; only the shadow of letters remains, like ghosts. No letters anymore, no meaning—only some marks on the board. Given enough time, all marks eventually become meaningless.

Once that signboard meant something: open, come in, buy, we have goods here. What was sold? Hardware, maritime equipment, rope, iron rings, machinery. Something of that sort. The materials of a trade whose need has gone elsewhere now, or perhaps nowhere at all. The shop is empty.

One day when there was less dirt on the glass, you stood and looked inside. You wiped the glass with your palm. Your feet stopped in front of the shop. There was almost nothing inside. A counter thick with dust. Empty shelves tangled in cobwebs. On the floor, a few faint rectangular marks where something once stood. A cabinet, perhaps, or a display shelf, or some other heavy thing. It had been removed, but its absence is what shows most clearly now. Like when you take a picture from a wall and the part that didn't fade in the sun remains. Like when someone leaves and their not being there in memory becomes more pronounced than their presence ever was.

This empty shop is more eloquent than a full one. When full, it was merely a shop; emptied, it has become unwittingly contemplative. Use, the cessation of use, and what remains when use has stopped. This silent truth is now its only exhibition. The faint marks on the floor, the faded signboard, the dirty glass, the dust-covered counter. These are its remnants. As your remnants are now room, chair, cup. Where you were, perhaps one day a faint rectangular mark will remain too. The mark of not being, clearer than the mark of being.

Above there is nothing else. You live on the topmost floor. Above it is only ceiling, tiles, seagulls, sky. One void upon another void. That is, sky, which has no end, no bottom, cannot be grasped. Ordinarily grey. Sometimes, very rarely, blue. Or something that could be called blue if you still had the inclination to name such things. But you gave up naming long ago. The sky has no need of its own name. Blue or not blue, it is what it is. The name is not for it; it is for you.

The sky is full without a word. The sea is the same, and the room.

Words are your uninvited addition to the world, an unsought gift you have pressed upon it—a gift the world never wanted, and manages perfectly well without. Just as it will manage without you. Time is merely a difference.

To the right there is another room. A wall stands between it and yours. Someone seems to be there. You hear it sometimes. But it is not a voice, not distinct footsteps, not even the recognizable sounds of familiar life. Something else. A kind of murmur. You hear it more at night. As if some weight were shifting its position in the dark. As if something, someone, were rearranging itself anew in the shadows.

You do not know if it is human. It might be human, or it might be merely things. Perhaps the wind slipping through the window crack is stirring the curtains. Perhaps a pile of papers is slowly settling. Perhaps some old coat hanging from a hook sways faintly in the distant breeze, ghostlike. You do not go seeking. You do not press your ear to the wall. Whether you hear the sound or not is ultimately of little consequence. Sound or no sound, you and the sound occupy separate rooms, a wall standing between you. Neither of you chose this wall. It was here before you came; it will remain after you are gone.

The question lies here. Many philosophers have raised it, yet none has offered a satisfactory answer. Now you too sit within that very question, as if asking without asking. In your chair, in silence, listening to that murmur. Is there truly a mind beyond the wall? A living presence? Some consciousness that sees, knows, feels—like yours, or utterly unlike yours—yet still perceives, apprehends, experiences? Or is there only sound? Murmur, movement, mere happenings? It could be anything. Rats, pipes, wind that has wandered in, some old house slowly subsiding, or perhaps only emptiness.

You do not know. Perhaps you never will. The most you can do is infer from the sound that something exists beyond. But what that “something” is, who that “someone” might be, whether that “someone” even knows itself—of this you can be certain of nothing. The wall keeps it hidden. As all walls do. As all depths do. You see your own face in a mirror, yet you do not know the depths that lie behind it; no face ever fully reveals what stands behind it. You assume a mind exists, consciousness exists, an “I” exists. But in the end this assumption rests upon sound, upon murmur. And these are no proof.

You are alone. At least within the bounds of what you truly know. And what you know does not extend far. You know with certainty only this: the wall exists, the sound exists. Everything else is inference. If we grant that another mind exists, it reaches you as the light of a dead star—a signal from some distant source you cannot verify, whose very existence you cannot confirm, whose origin may no longer be, or may never have been. Perhaps the murmur beyond the wall is like that too. Dead light. The belated vibration of something that may no longer exist, or never existed at all. You do not know.

And this not-knowing is the true wall. Not plaster, not brick—unknowing. This is what separates you from all things, from everyone, from the other—if there truly is an other, if “other” is not merely another name for the wall itself. The wall cares nothing. Who is here, who is there. It is indifferent. It does its work: it divides, it partitions, it keeps at distance.

The wall is exceedingly skilled at this. More skilled than skin, than face, even than words. Those who once made promises—they said they would bind people together.

One night you placed your hand against the wall. Palm pressed flat, alone. Against the plaster. And what did you feel then? Cold. A dryness. And beneath that, almost imperceptible, a faint tremor. But where did that tremor come from? From the other side? From the old house settling? Or was it your own pulse at the wrist, touching the wall and echoing back? You could not say. And this inability to say taught you something: that you could never be entirely certain whether what you felt came from within or without; whether the tremor belonged to you or to the world. A truth philosophers have failed to articulate even in volumes.

You receive this education sitting before a wall. You received it. Month after month. The books on the shelf could not teach what the wall taught. Books speak of others; the wall says nothing of anyone else, yet in its silence it reveals everything. There is a boundary between “you” and “not-you.” And this boundary is not meaningless. Rather, it is precisely because the boundary exists that warmth becomes possible, intimacy, separateness, solidity, being held—all of it.

Without a wall, would there be such a thing as a room? The word “warmth” may not be exact, yet some inner condition would not exist. By being distinct, the wall makes certain things possible. As a cup is a cup precisely by being separate. Perhaps its intimacy lies here. Where the wall ends, your hand begins. You are not certain. But you feel it: the wall does not merely obstruct—the wall creates a condition.

What exactly that condition is, you have no language for. The wall itself does not know either. Yet it acts. As the cup acts, as the hand acts. To simply go on doing, without knowing why, without raising the question. That is enough. The wall does not know why it separates; it simply does. In that, its work is complete.

You do not know why you sit here. Yet you sit. You sit. And yet for you, accepting “this is enough” is difficult. Here lies the difference between you and the wall. The wall needs no sufficiency. You do.

This may be why the wall is happier than you.

12.

You do something. You do not know whether to call it a game. It might be called a habit, perhaps meditation, perhaps prayer. Though it is unclear to whom the prayer is directed. To the stone? To emptiness? Or to that unspoken rule between taking and releasing? Like beads on a rosary. Each stone is like a single breath—the atheist’s prayer beads, where each “picking up” means a taking, and each “setting down” means a release.

Grasp. Release. Grasp again. Release again. As if all of human philosophy fits between these two fingers. What more has humanity learned? Grasping, releasing; birth is grasping, death is releasing, and all in between is merely the endless practice of these two.

The game is quite simple. Not complex like cards. It requires fewer things, less arrangement, less explanation, less will. For one whose everything has gradually diminished, such simplicity is fitting. You have some stones. Gathered from a beach, picked up one day, another day, in the interstices of countless comings and goings, month after month. Small, smooth, cool in the hand.