The First Philosopher in the Land of Doze
The Land of Doze is out there somewhere, but you wouldn’t bother asking the inhabitants if it were an unusual land—they don’t do questions.
In fact, they don’t really do anything.
They live alone in sporadic dwellings, one inhabitant to a dwelling: domiciles of perfect accident—not built by hands but by the deftness of nature in grottos, caves, and tangles of vines. In most, perhaps all, cases, each inhabitant, standing quietly in his place, can see, if he goes to the trouble, the silhouette of some neighbor standing quietly in his. I say “his” out of habit. There are no genders in Doze.
These creatures eat the fruit that grows within reach on the vines and drooping tree limbs around them, and have no other wants, since the weather is never less than ideal and there are no threatening animals. They would never dream of leaving their familiar cells, for the truth is, in this land the idea of doing something has yet to be conceived.
Or rather, hadn’t been conceived up until the events of this story, which concerns a development that planted a strange seed, at once ominous and wonderful, in the midst of this motionless folk.
The main character in this drama, of course, had no name, so I’ll call him Dorman.
It was Dorman’s custom to wake up every morning after his night’s rest, attend to his natural functions, eat a piece of fruit, and then stand in the center of his dwelling for three or four hours. Then, as hunger would ever so gently return, he would eat another piece of fruit, and afterwards stand for several more hours, sometimes moving a few steps in one direction or another, sometimes gazing out through the vines at this or that neverchanging view, or sometimes at the dwelling of his only visible neighbor, a certain distance away, where he could see the shadowy denizen standing just like himself—before having his evening fruit, standing a few more hours in the slow fading of the light, and then reclining in the spot where he stood, to sleep. Dorman was never curious about his neighbor, because Dorman was never curious. He could plainly see that the person was only standing in his house precisely like himself, so there was nothing to be curious about.
We move to a particular day. At first it might have seemed like any other. The sun rose as it always did, finding Dorman in his arboreal hut, as it always did. But there was something different, something the sun was unable to spy. And this was the fact that Dorman’s sleep the night before had been, in a way unprecedented in his experience, strangely troubled.
He found himself host to a new presence, inside him like a shadow or whisper. He moved his inner eye around this novel sensation which he lacked the means to verbalize, in the way we might have, as: I am not happy.
Everything changed.
The moment Dorman knew he was different from what he had been, he knew he existed. The realization was put into words, so to speak, and there was no going back. And he began to have what you and I would call thoughts—for example: that he could never again be unaware of his existence now that he was aware of it, just as when he had not been aware of it, he had not been aware that he had not been aware of it. And value judgments—for example: there’s no problem with existing as long as you don’t know you are.
Dorman was confronted with a new discomfort: how to proceed from there.
In the end, Dorman didn’t really arrive at a preference so much as hit upon the concept of doing something rather than this new thing he suddenly knew about, nothing.
On a certain afternoon Dorman’s neighbor, standing alone in the center of his dwelling and looking through the trees in the direction of Dorman’s place, saw something he had never before seen or dreamed of.
He saw Dorman walk outside.
The neighbor stared, and as he did, the unexpected sensation of incredulity appeared, uninvited, in his mind. And when Dorman lay down in the grass and dust before his spot, where he remained a long succession of days, forgoing his sustenance which fell to the ground and rotted all around his now merely haunted house, until he became perfectly motionless and then strangely melted into the earth leaving only his bleached memorial frame, the neighbor watched almost without blinking his eyes, and then one day turned to look at his neighbor in a way he never had before.
July 21, 2022