Of Love, Loss and Brutal Beauty

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost. (Isak Dineson, 'Babette's Feast').In Cape Town, there is a suburb called Kenilworth. It is a suburb with a mixture of office parks and residential homes. At the entrance to the suburb – as you exit the highway, you have to stop at traffic lights. There are always 2-3 beggars at these traffic lights that with their professional downcast eyes, ply their trade of pity seeking. In the midst of a dark Cape winter, with the biting North Westerly wind knifing through their meagre thin clothes and soaked through by the cold miserable rain, they look in on me ensconced in my cosy executive German saloon with heated leather seats and climate control, Vivaldi wafting through the 8 speaker hi-fi system. I never give to them, not because they irritate me or because I think that they will buy alcohol with any money I give them, but because I envy them and their freedom. All I want to do is write, yet I am forced to make a living in the business world - what a mind-numbing fruitless waste of a human life! that money may one day be my only legacy. I wonder idly as I wait at the robots, what the consequences would be if I just pulled up the handbrake and stepped out of the car and walked out of my life to the soft wet green grass on the verge. Would people come looking for me? Would my family disown me or have me committed? Would they say I had had a breakdown? Would I lose my job? Would people nod wisely as though they had known all along that there was something not quite right with me. Or perhaps I would just disappear into that unseen mass of beggars that look in on me now – people too embarrassed or unsure of what went wrong. I only know that none of what they think will be true. Only Thoreaux would understand. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Henry David Thoreau, "Walden", 1854