The Intimate Stranger

He is man of today. Not tomorrow or yesterday. He is a nomad. At home everywhere and nowhere. He never stays long in one place. At the same time he always seeks the real and authentic, and so he has to stay long enough to think that he has experienced the truth of his temporary residence, has gotten a feel of the place. Always an intimate stranger; he wishes to absorb himself in his surrounding; to let it touch and move him and at the same time he remains outside of it, always reflecting on it, never getting too attached, never getting too real, always knowing that his escape is just round the corner.
He goes to a place not to have his beliefs reinforced but to have them crushed. To have them crushed and replaced and to come out a new man. Him aim is not self-realisation but self-destruction and rebirth. He believes himself fundamentally without a permanent self to realise. He can only break down its ephemeral shell to have it rebuilt again. Everything about him is built on shaky foundations. Everything is built with the expectation of its imminent destruction.
He fears to dream, to work towards future goals, because he fears to be trapped by them. To him the future is the past’s enslavement of the present. The future exists to him not as potentiality but as a illusion. He knows it is not he who will live it. The future belongs to someone else. Nor is his past his own. Each rebirth removes from him from his past.
And yet his escape from the future and the past makes him a victim of the present. As the present invariably bring moments of unhappiness, boredom, despair he finds he can neither project towards a brighter future, nor can he draw strength from a past he no longer connects with. The present proves a trap and instead he is compelled to treat his own life from a distance; a distance not in the past nor future, but merely an abstraction. He is obliged to draw on the abstract nature of thought to create a gap between himself and his present moment. He thus remains always at a distance from himself.
In the end he watches himself as if with a passionate disinterest. As if reading a book he finds captivating yet at the same time fearing becoming too engaged in the story he disengages himself. So he fears becoming enslaved by his own life. Fears to care too much to regret its inevitable end.