Warren Schmaus Prize for Philosophy Writing The Ground

Paula Pardo

Sitting on the floor has a special effect on me. It is a reminder of the things I used to do as a child. How I used to play with my brother’s Hot Wheels cars on the kitchen floor’s tiles or how I used to wait for my parents to pick me up from school sitting on the sidewalk in front of it. Sometimes counting cars, or dogs. Sometimes imagining a story for each individual that walked in front of me. Those with the white beards and hair, whose back made them look to the floor at all times, those that walked with one hand holding their cane and the other a book, or a coffee, those were probably writers, or fans of the newspapers’ crosswords. Their stories never had a happy ending, I don’t know why. I used to imagine that they had done all what their lives allowed them to do. They were professors, writers, husbands, dads, neighbors, bar clients and library visitors. They had a very specific love for a niche topic. Topic that they had encountered when they were young and passionate for politics, when they were rebels and wanted to write their names in the history of the revolutions. That topic stayed with them even after they realized that even the revolution they were planning was all part of the system they wanted to end. That system had planned, accounted for, and even fed their revolutionary ideas. They were needed characters in the narrative of an oppressive system. They were needed as proof of the huge advantage that the system had taken in this race. No one could go ahead of it, no one could compete, no one could win. The race had already ended a long time ago, the system was watching all the other runners from their winner’s pedestal, eating popcorn and throwing some of it to the track. That was the reason why the white bearded guys used to walk looking at the floor, to avoid becoming an entertaining show of ants slipping on the pop corn.

That topic they were so passionate about was not even interesting, not relevant at all. But it kept them alive, it gave them something to hold and survive the currents of fast-paced people in the cities. It also distracted them from the first pages of the newspapers, from the big signs announcing the biggest of sales, and from the watch in their wrist that revealed that their time seemed to never end, and the time of their most loved ones seemed to have the worst of endings.The coffee that they had in their other hand was also a reminder of that. They hated to see themselves reflected in mirrors, they would rather see the current appearance of their wrinkled face on the dark surface of their coffee. It was less real, less detailed, less alarming. It’s weird that they were afraid to die, even though they had nothing to live for. Because, as I said, they had done all they could have done. And don’t get me wrong, they were happy, they had been happy. However, they were still looking for something, something that they knew was not going to be revealed to them. That was the only truth they were afraid to admit, the only truth that they could not omit, the only truth that they were never able to ignore.

Who would have thought that the only certainties in our lives would be love and death, and that no one taught us how to love nor how to die (and no one was obliged to teach us). Yet we look for explanations, we look for placebos, we look for purpose. We look for prophets in white bearded old men, we look for finiteness in the horizon, we look for comfort and safety in parents that arrive late to our school. Maybe the waiting, the hoping, the lying keeps us sane enough to function. Maybe sitting on the floor gives us the best angle to see everything falling down. All things fall onto the ground, and almost all things are held by the ground. It’s the best angle to reflect, to write, and to exist. It has witnessed all history, all stories, all beginnings and endings. It is the scenario of this play and race in which there’s no gold medal and no prizes, there’s only an unstoppable treadmill called time.

Time. We gave it its name and we don’t even know its meaning. We can tell the time but we can’t tell the why. And time laughs. It laughs because somehow we are always late and we will always be late. We are cursed to live in the past, in fading memories and burning regrets. All lessons are taught by the past, all happiness is safe in the past, and all consciousness is in the past. Maybe the white bearded guys knew that after dying, there was no more making of the past. Maybe that was why they tried to hide from time and death, so that they could write about life while looking endlessly everywhere to feel alive.