To quote Antoine De Saint-Exupéry in the novel entitled The Little Prince: “Men occupy a very small space upon the Earth. If two billion inhabitants who people its surface were to stand upright and somewhat crowded together, as they do for some public assembly, they could easily be put into one public square twenty miles long and twenty miles m\wide. All humanity could be piled up on a small Pacific islet.”
A pretty good teaser, isn’t it? A way to start feeding one’s wiggling and zealous nerve
cells. In a book by Jostein Gaarder entitled Sophie’s World, the story revolved in only three words-“Who Am I?”. The pursuit of who man is can be traced back since the earliest civilization. Way, way back the arcadian life of the Greek philosophers. Since then, there have never been far more astounding and interesting topic than MAN itself. “Who am I” is just a simple phrase compose of three simple words but when pieced together proves to be the most arduous query one has to answer. And this is manifested in the book The Solitaire Mystery when the author said: “We human beings are so clever in so many ways- we explore space and the compositions of atoms but we don’t have a better understanding of what we are”. Nonetheless, man have never stopped struggling to know and answer the question of who he is as evidenced by the philosophers from ancient Greece down to the post-modern philosophers.
I am just an ordinary man and I even act like one. I live life like an ordinary one and I am in pursuit of who I am. And what follows recounts an ordinary man’s perceptions and realizations of what man is.
Man is a simple complex being. Man’s simplicity stems from man’s classical definition: man is a rational and social being. But what makes a man a simple yet complex being lies in a very important feature that sets us apart form animal- REASON. Reason is what helps us discern right from wrong. Our capabilities to think and use our mind make us more intricate than the animals which rely on their instincts. A phrase from the book The Solitaire Mystery says that if our brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would be so stupid we wouldn’t able to understand it after all. Thus, this complexity thrusts men to depict or portray his being in simpler ways. Man is depicted in paintings, novels, poems and even in movies. Just take for example Amorsolo’s paintings which centered on ordinary men working their butts off to earn and live. Also consider the painting Honoré Daumier’s The Third Class which depict a much simpler and less enduring portrait of the life of the poor. Also consider Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing in a Stream, it no longer shows the complexity of women’s fickle minded-ness but only a woman bathing in a stream. Man’s complexity has urged other men to exemplify a multifaceted man in simpler ways.
Man is a gift. One reason why I like holidays such as Christmas and birthdays is that it’s the time of the year when I have the chance to receive gifts. Who wouldn’t want to receive gifts anyway? Although, there’s a saying that it is better to give than to receive, one would really feel ecstatic if one also does the receiving not just the giving. There is this pure bliss in receiving a gift especially when one sees how the gifts are carefully and majestically wrapped. No one can measure the sheer joy when one unwraps the gifts. A French philosopher in the name of Hans George Gadamer regarded man as a difference or a gift. Man is a gift because what truly defines him is not on the outside but in the inside. The wrap is just a tip of the iceberg and the enormous part remains hidden by the wrapping so laboriously done. Man is a gift because there is more to him than meets the eye. Man is a gift because he is as precious as a gift. He is priceless and no amount of money can match his worth. He is a gift because God created him. He gave him breath and life. He is gift to his fellow-men by giving and sharing himself to them. He is priceless just like Da Vinci’s Monalisa or Michael Angelo’s Pieta.
Man is an unfinished work of art. There has been so many attempts to answer the question who man is. But there is as much definition as much as there are attempts done. Thus, there is no standard basis as to who man is and the question is still left hanging in the air just an unfinished painting left in a corner or left on its stand waiting when the hand that works it will get back and finishes it. Man is considered as un unifinished work because man has never fully contemplated who he really is. There maybe answers but the curiosity, thirst and pursuit of knowledge has never been quenched. Man is considered a mystery yet to unravel just like an unfinished canvass that has yet to unfold. Man’s hand has never been empty. It is always full. We always work hard towards whatever we need to achieve and most of the time we are never satisfied. Man simply never ceases.
Man is art in action. Quoting a phrase in a book, it says: “If the world is a magic trick, then there must be a great magician,too” Parapahrasing that, “if man is a work of art in action, there must be a skillfull hand that does the painting”. What man does in ordinary life is art itself. How a poor man struggles everyday to survive. How those squatters in Mega Manila crammed themselves in a teeny space along with rodents and cockroaches. How the street children wrestle with poverty and malnutrition. Just look at their sunken faces which denies their age. How those children are stripped with their youth. The emotions registered on their faces when they see other children like their age but so exceedingly blessed. You can catch a glimpse of their longing to go to the finest schools and have the finest things had fate not interceded. Their agony, their anguish, their woes and their delight aover simple things are worth capturing and so moving to gazed upon on. You don’t have to spend millions or thousands of pesos just to see those grotesques or picturesque because the horrors of the living and surviving are real life paintings more than enough to fill one’s eye for beauty and those eyes of paintings connoisseurs.
Man is not man without God. Behind every work of art is a brilliant painter wielding the brush. Man can never exist without God. A verse in a bible says that God without man is still God but man without God is nothing. Behind our woes, agonies, sufferings, happiness and struggles, there is a magnanimous, all-knowing and all –powerful painter who never fails to remember. Life may be hard with those harsh realities and grim truths but those are part of men’s lives. What every man must understand is that God does everything for a reason.
Gnothi Seauton (Know Thyself) is Socrates’ famous line. But is that all? Is knowing enough for a man? Just as it is enough to identify a painting with a painter? Is it enough that we know Da Vinci painted Mona Lisa or that Van Goethe painted the Starry, Starry Night? To some maybe yes, yes it is enough to know who we are but isn’t more meaningful to share what we know to others. Isn’t more momentous to partake and lend a hand in making other people know who they are just as we do not only identify a painting with its painter but also understanding the painter’s life and what moved him to come-up with such a masterpiece? Isn’t it vital to understand what a work of art is trying to tell us?
It all starts with knowing but it definitely doesn’t end there. Knowing who you are is not enough. Knowing who a man is and what makes him a man is not sufficient. We have to share what we know with other, we have to partake in other people’s lives as they struggle in their own endeavors. We have to partake in their sojourn of knowing who they are. Man need not just to know himself but to know other people because men are presents to each other. Men have to touch other men’s lives just like how a painting moves and touch our lives. Just like how artists touch other people’s lives by living an indelible mark and engraving their names in history through the meaningful work they’ve done. A man knowing who he is is not enough. A man leaving something remarkable that makes other people know and remember him, is nobler.
I may be an ordinary man but so are those artists before they became famous. But one can never be EXTRAordinary without being ordinary.
