emotionless

recent bouts of verbal diaorrhea have abounded in almost every blog i've been to...maybe it's the weather. or some sort of global pms which mysteriously descended onto earth, a virus carried by alien spores originating from the meteor which crashed through someone's roof a few months ago...i saw it on the news, i forget where this was but the woman is planning to sell the rock to the museum or something to repair her roof. for some reason i find this amusing. here we are getting all excited about a meteor actually making it through the atmosphere to earth, bringing all sorts of possibilities about discovering life/water/stripey elephants on other planets and all this poor woman wants to do is repair her broken roof :)

in light of this emotional outpouring, i find the book i've just read extremely revealing in it's depiction of Christopher Boone, a fifteen year old boy suffering from Asperger's Syndrome. Asperger's syndrome is a disorder whereby the victim experiences marked, drastic deficiencies in social skills as part of a larger set of symptoms. As a result, our hero Christopher knows very little about human beings. he is emotionally detached from everything, feeling hate, anger, sadness, fear, etc. only when he is presented with something he doesnt like (ie anything of the colour yellow or brown, or when the different foods he eats touch each other). the only thing he really knows about is mathematics, and if he had a choice he would rather be surrounded by machines and metal than human beings. Logical to a fault, when he finds out his mother had been having an affair with his neighbour Mr. Shears, he reacts by saying, "But I don't feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isnt around anymore. So i would be feeling sad about something that isnt real and doesnt exist. And that would be stupid."

Reading the book, i initially thought how great it would be if i could detach myself sometimes and look at things the way he does. i declined my offers. therefore they do not exist. so feeling sad about them would be stupid. simple. like a maths formula. but as i read on, i found myself becoming more and more horrified, and less amused at Christopher's total lack of respect, tact, gratitude...everything that is normal, or taken for granted as ordinary human practices of interaction. His insensitivity was at times chilling...it made me scared. i know now that i am someone who cannot live without her emotions, shitty as they make me feel sometimes. what is life if you can't feel? probably boring as hell, empty, meaningless. Christopher's take on love is this: "loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when i get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me." and i know many of us will agree - a person who loves us do, and are somewhat expected, to do these things for us. but it was scary to me how love to him is not an emotion, but a set of criterion. later on in the book, when he finds out his father has been untruthful thereby failing to meet one of the criteria, he logically deduces that his only choice is to leave home. i dont know if this will make sense to anyone, but it scares me, this...absolute sense of detachment. I feel that if i met him and touched my hand to his neck, i wouldn't feel a pulse. His rationality is so black and white that it is almost...inhuman.

I suppose by saying that i am one of those people who defines humanity as the ability to experience feelings. is it? withouth feelings it is stil possible to live a meaningful life. logically, helping the poor is good. an emotionless person could still be one of those inspirational people who go off to live in an impoverished third world country for ten years building wells. what would that be like, doing it for the logicality and not for the heartwarming feeling of being able to help? yet, when put like that, it begins to seem almost selfish to have that feeling - its so personal, not like money or water which can be shared. obviously logic is not a tool which can be used against emotion, yet in this world im sure that happens all the time, in courtrooms and divorce cases and even hospitals with the practice of triage.

that's why i'm never going to do philosophy...at the end of it all, there's just no answer to anything.