Life's Reckoning

Alas, I've squandered more than half my life studying! When I think of what life truly means—all the things worth learning and understanding—I mean things like listening to music, reading books, watching films, observing people's lives up close, painting, taking photographs.

Yet look how people call all of this a waste of time!

And here I am, having learned so much arithmetic, so much accounting, and yet—look—people can't even balance the ledger of their own lives. What good, then, are all these useless formulas?

I memorized my way through university, passed my exams, and not a single line of it has served me in life.

What has served me are a few films, some songs, or the sorrow I witnessed firsthand in the lives of people I knew closely.

What has served me most is the ache from childhood—wanting to buy something, lacking the means, going without. The absence of things I desperately desired but could never have. I learned so much from these absences! This is why all these gadgets, this horse-and-buggy nonsense, have never had any pull on me.

Don't take me seriously. I'm half-mad.