Reflecting in the Castle

Crak des Chevaliers castle is more impressive on the outside than the inside. Not that this means going inside isn't a fine experience, however. The best thing is to walk around the outer of the two defensive walls and get as close as you dare to the edge. Oddly enough, I felt even more creeping vertigo here than I had at the much higher cliffs of Hasankeyf. Maybe I'd been disturbed by earlier noticing a loose rock that I'd almost vigorously stepped on. Any of those on the edge might have led to interesting consequences.

I had a coffee at the castle's cafe and began in earnest to do something perhaps noticeably odd, something I'd thought of doing three years ago in China - analyse my life in terms of what percentages of it I've been involved in particular phases. Maybe, in a fit of unbridled narcissistic obsession I will publish a comprehensive report at a later date. Here for now I'll give just three examples of the results I came to. Obviously, the results are rough and cannot be exact, but I do have a pretty good memory for things I've been up to and when and for how long. Clearly, all these percentages will change as I get older.

I) I have spent 8.4% of the past thirty six years of my life in a state of continuous unawareness*. Never having slipped into a coma, I am referring to the three years (at least) prior to my first ever memory. By the way, I'm pretty sure this was sitting on my Mum's bicycle seat, fixed between her handlebars, being cycled back from kindergarten to 69 Barton Road, Cambridge.

II) I have spent 26.1% of my life at 'school', excluding the school holidays. I put the school in quotation marks because I'm referring only to my education up to the age of 17, when I finished my A-levels. Many people, I know, follow the US example and include University or other Higher Education as part of 'schooling', but I, as an Englishman, do not. If University is added, again excluding holidays as well as those periods during which, for varying reasons, I suspended my studies, it rises to 34%.

The final astonishing fact is a little disappointing, given my love of the 'open road':

III) I have spent a mere 2% of my life engaged in the soul warming 'Odysseus-like' pursuit of solo travelling abroad. This rises to 5.3% if you include travelling abroad with others, including my family.

Actually, I'm almost persuaded to recommend this kind of quantative analysis of one's life to everyone. I imagine it's far more interesting doing this with your own life than it is reading (as you have had to) about someone else's.

Delphi's Oracle, after all, instructs us to 'Know Thyself'. Yet I wonder if we don't too often attach a too subjective, interiorised understanding to this. Maybe, more often than it should be, this is understood to mean you should reflect introspectively on your 'occult' or esoteric self, the perceiving I, that mysterious, possibly ungraspable 'me' that everyone - except the Buddhists - believes we all possess. Sometimes this search is avoided outright, because it can be a tortuous and perilous affair, putting us in touch with all kinds of uncomfortable, embarrassing revelations.

Questions might also be raised about what this 'self' is that we are trying to reflect on. Is it, for humanists, Freud's Id, Ego or Superego that we are talking about, and if all three then in what combination. Otherwise, looking at things spiritually, by the 'self' are we talking about the 'ego' or the 'true self', that aspect of our realities which by many is understood to be inseparable from the divine.

Undoubtedly there is more to us than we perceive ourselves to be from the inside, however we understand that. There is also us as we relate, bodily, to the objective, external world, peopled by other independently thinking, judging people who have no experience of that 'private' self of our own which only we can know.

Even though we are often counselled in these unhumble, self-assertive days to not give a camel's ass what otherse think of us, it's undeniably the case that all the people we meet and interact with, to degrees related to their powers of attention and basic interest in us, have an impression of how we come across to them. Unbiased by not being the person in question, they can see us from the outside in a way we never can, however worryingly enthusiastic ones self-videoing exploits might be. That public, embodied, exoteric 'I' is as much a part of who I am as anything I might suppose is the truth relating to my inner psychodramas.

Sure, their evaluations of us will be conditioned by a different set of biased lenses of perception. A Palestinian, for example, may be inclined to assess the behaviour of an Israeli, and an Israeli that of a Palestinian, with an additional ingredient of malignity, lacking in that of a Mexican or a Mongol for one another. But this doesn't change the fact that the ways we come across to others, as multifarious as those may be, depending on the observer, are integrally involved in any understanding of who we are.

The problem is that in order to get this knowledge of what others think of you, you may have to embarrass and demean yourself in potentially pathetic and deeply insecure ways. You can't accumulate the necessary data for this kind of self-analysis on your own.

So, maybe what you can do, more easily, to reflect on your public, embodied self is to do what I've done and take a look at what you've been up to, and for how long, in the theatre of the world. Of course I know that in a very limited sense we already do this through the very formalised procedure known as 'Writing your CV'. But this begs the question, I fear worryingly too often answered in the affirmative: 'Are we what we 'do' or 'have done' in the world of employment?'

Speaking personally, as one might expect on a blog, I don't understand my identity in terms of what I do for a living. Yes, this is partially because I don't particularly like being an English language teacher. But I hope, even if I loved my job, I'd accept that I'm not my profession, since work, evaluated as it is in terms of success and attainment, income and status, so often leads one to understand oneself in distinction from, and either above or beneath, others, as somehow set apart from our common, shared humanity.

Obviously, my ability to compile a really thoroughgoing analysis of my life's activities is limited. I cannot know, for example, what percentage of my waking life I've spent talking to single, available women that I have both found attractive and actually stood a chance with. Or, for example, the percentage of my life I've spent brushing my teeth or taking a bath, eating in restaurants or walking in the open air, reading books or spent lost, delightedly, in the arms of adequate seating before the giant screen of a multiplex.

Yet who knows, perhaps this knowledge is somehow out there, recorded by celestial clerks keeping assiduous records of my behaviour, and yours too. I can but hope so, and hope to find out so if and when I'm translated into ether. Being in this analytical regard a stereotypical virgoan, I must confess I'd find the findings fascinating.