Where Does This Feeling Come From?

Self-control is the control that the responsibility of remaining faithful to your own being in a moment of great weakness and doubt ensures.

I felt like I was at sea, somewhere very far from the shore. Everything seemed distant and unreal to me. I grabbed my hand and shook it, it seemed foreign to me. I wondered in fright if I was getting sick, but my fear was also unreal, insignificant, because suddenly I didn’t care if I lived or died. Had I let myself be bound slowly, imperceptibly by invisible chains? I fought for my salary, I was proud of my title as a scribe, I spoke Greek words, I went back to the same bed every night, I valued food and I fed my pride with the girls’ secret looks. I often got drunk, followed my comrades in brothels, slept with women without more remorse than others. I did not miss work, I confessed, I humbly confessed my sins and I received forgiveness. I was neither more guilty nor more innocent than others.

And yet, I felt terribly guilty. Where did this feeling come from? How different I had been in my youth, when I was lost and my only truth was the God in me and death. Then I enjoyed fresh water and did not associate with bodily temptations. Analyzing myself in the green and gloomy light of the chapel, I knew in my heart that I did not feel guilty just because I had become a slave to the senses. Not because of my doubts. My refusal to acknowledge good and evil was also small. The reason was deeper. *

Can you analyze your feelings by agreeing to recognize the good and the bad in the existence of a being that projects itself into a silent and smoky distance, called “atonement”?

Man’s confessions are formed when he feels something in his place, inside his whole existence, something that torments him not necessarily through the dramatic realism of his expectations, but perhaps through a regret meant to free him from the burden of white nights. His condition is triggered by the interweaving of memories about certain events that destiny has brought in his way, as if to foreshadow the destination to which he is heading.

Do you take into account the particularities of the destination you are heading to? What are these particularities? Are they related to the values of life that look to the past?

The emptiness of one’s own monologue: here you feel all the truths of your heart, because what is highlighted when you write your life story is an agreement with reality, the confirmation of your own ideas about yourself and the world in an outpouring of longings, fears, failures, frustrations, regrets that reflect obedience to the voice of conscience. To a contented self-image of content rallies its own respite of thought, in the context of a doubt regarding the necessity of the soul to stick to the facts, to accept the reality only after a prior verification of it in concrete.

Man’s feelings are the cause of his doubts, while doubts may arise in the situation of the interaction between what you are prepared to understand about yourself and what you are not prepared to endure from life. You don’t have to understand much about your preparations for life, except that the situations that put you in difficulty are the cause of the doubts that grind your conscience. Why does the time lived only with yourself have the gift of defending yourself in front of conscience, in front of the hardships of life – the biggest of which is to try to endure yourself defeated by your own expectations and desires?

Atonement is the quality of man to stay awake in the sphere of consciousness, with such a large share of the emotional in the decision to develop what is best in a story about the duality of the human soul: between the plus infinity of joy and the minus infinity of sorrow, between the being which also imagines the moral being.

Where Does This Feeling Come From? Well, the feeling of guilt comes from the doubts that bother you about what you are not able to control. And what else can man control but the distance between the real and the unreal, between what you are and what you want to appear to be, out of the desperation of the hope of being and not just of existing.

Sometimes it’s good not to have high expectations of yourself, especially if your expectations aren’t realistic.

* Note: Mika Waltari - Young Ioannis, Polirom Publishing House, 2020.