Monday, November 14, 2005

On "Death in Teheran" and Life's One Good Choice

From among the various stories in Existentialism/Humanism, one story that has always lingered in my mind, along with Camus’s classic essay concerning the tragic Greek mythological character Sisyphus, is the story Death in Teheran. I first encountered this story while reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning where the esteemed psychologist related this allegory to psychological trauma experienced by the Jews in Auschwitz concentration camps (see pages 74-77).
The story goes as follows: Once upon a time, an affluent Persian walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant wailed that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened to take his soul. The servant begged for his master to give him the fastest horse available so that he could flee to Teheran, a refuge that can be reach by sunset. The master gave his blessing and the servant left in haste with the horse. Upon returning home, the master himself met Death, and asked him “Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?” Death replied, “I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran.”
Besides the innate tragedy present in the allegory, the tale struck me more because of the realism contained in it. Oh how many of us suffer the same fate as that with the wretched servant!
One of the more painful experiences that life brings to a human person is accepting responsibility for our actions. Sartre puts it more bluntly when he said that freedom is a curse because our freedom necessarily results to owning responsibility to our free actions. Because of this freedom, man ought to be a temporal being; he ought to be time-conscious. As a result, it is inherent in man to calculate the risks involved in his plans, study its consequences, speculate scenarios, and map out alternative plan of actions. The most priceless possession a person has is his power of choice; it is also life’s greatest shackle.
Many have suffered from wrong choices. Nonetheless, they have to bear responsibility for their wrong choice. They cannot escape it; it is like a shadow that follows them in midday. Sometimes, we have to choose from two disastrous alternatives. The cliché sounds more profound: people sometimes have to choose the lesser of two evils.
But even if there appears no real good choice at all, man still has to bear responsibility for his choices. Because of this terrible circumstance, he refrains from making a choice since he is afraid of the responsibility of his action. Thus, sometimes people just let it all hang out; they prefer to let fate make the choice for them.
But when one really thinks about it, letting fate just unfold is in itself a choice. Having no choice is in itself a choice; a consequence that one has to bear.
How many true loves never really bloomed because we just let fate run its course. Afraid of suffering from the heartache of unrequited love, many just hide their true feelings and just let things unfold. They just watch happy couples walk by and just suffer inside while looking at a life that they wish they had. Unknown to them, they could have had it had they just risked their hearts on the line.
Many people think fate is one’s master, and we, as its servant, must not try to ruin it by not letting it take its own course. If you believe in this, in your life of great apathy, you are its greatest prisoner.
There is no such thing as pre-destiny. Your destiny is something that you have to decide for yourself. Nothing in life just simply happens. Nothing can come out of nothing. Even if the evil we sought to avoid in our life just simply walks on our doorstep, we should not simply let fate unfold. We should grab life and grab it by its horn. Life is simply the sum of all our choices.
Even if sometimes life gives us no good choice available, we must still be proactive about it. Even if all hope has been lost and our fate appears predestined, we still have one good choice left: we can always choose how life will affect us. If only the servant in Death in Teheran knew his, marching towards his ultimate destiny doesn’t seem that gloomy it all. I could picture him smiling, his head held up high, the tracks pointing towards the crimson sunset in the horizon as his horse gallops him to his death.#

8 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Really well said. Thanks.

4:29 PM  
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10:51 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, what I don't understand is why didn't the servant run away, not to the location death stated but to somewhere else as surely that's a choice afforded to him

6:22 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

We always want to deny it in universal consciousness but it still is the jungle law embedded in life, it's naivety not to accept it.

6:42 PM  

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