THE NON-SENSE OF IT ALL...

“Senses! You don’t know what you’re talking about. Look around you. Here in this shop I have everything that can gratify the senses: apples, onions, and acid drops; pepper and mustard; cosy comforters and hot water bottles. Through the window I delight my eyes with the old church and market place, built in the days when beauty came naturally from the hands of mediaeval craftsmen. My ears are filled with delightful sounds, from the cooing of doves and the humming of bees to the wireless echoes of Beethoven and Elgar. My nose can gloat over our sack of fresh lavender or our special sixpenny Eau de Cologne when the smell of rain on dry earth is denied me. My senses are saturated with satisfactions of all sorts. But when I am full to the neck with onions and acid drops; when I am so fed up with the mediaeval architecture that I had rather die than look at another cathedral; when all I desire is rest from sensation, not more of it, what use will my senses be to me if the starry heavens still seem no more than a senseless avalanche of lumps of stone and wisps of gas - if the destiny of Man holds out no higher hope to him than the final extinction and annihilation of so mischievous and miserable a creature?”

[Village Wooing, Conversation Three, G.B. Shaw]

Shaw said it better than anyone else could have. An anatomy of that one moment, when we are so lost to stimuli all around us, that we forget our own essences. When our senses are pounded so heavily with sight sound and smell, that we can no longer derive pleasure from them, but feel mercilessly bombarded until we erode away. An endless barrage of stimuli, that we choose to see our own selves reflected in, rather than see a true honest image of ourselves and what we are becoming.

Perhaps we are still far from that moment of truth, where we have eroded away enough to consciously register what is happening. To finally sense ourselves, beneath and behind what our senses show to us. But that time is coming, when we as a race need to find a patch of grass beneath a starry sky or a rock by a serene shore and really think about where it is that we are headed. Indeed, does the destiny of Man hold out no higher hope to him than the final extinction and annihilation of so mischievous and miserable a creature?