To Be or Not to Be?
To Be or Not To Be, That is Dasein
Setting: An old, quiet library that seems to exist outside of time. Shelves stretch into a misty infinity. At a heavy oak table sits SOPHIA, her presence calm and luminous. Across from her, CARL nurses a cup of tea, his gaze analytical. DYLAN slouches in his chair, restless, a faint smirk playing on his lips as if he's just heard the setup to a cosmic joke.
Sophia: Gentlemen, thank you for coming. I’ve brought you here to ponder the singular condition of being human. Not the question of being, but the quality of it. What it means to truly be there, thrown into the world.
Dylan: (Chuckles, a low, gravelly sound) To be there? It means to feel. To burn. To rage against the dying of the light with every fiber of your soul. You fill the void with words, with song, with whatever fire you can find. Sometimes, that fire comes from a bottle. It burns just as bright.
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
— Carl Jung (1875-1961)
Carl: (Nodding slowly, steepling his fingers) The fire is essential, Dylan, I agree. But it is not the entire mechanism. We so often mistake the human psyche for a moral battlefield, a struggle between virtue and vice. But that is a profound oversimplification. Our consciousness is not a scale weighing good against evil; it is a grand pendulum, swinging eternally not between right and wrong, but between profound sense and exquisite nonsense.
Dylan: (Leans forward, his eyes alight with recognition) Nonsense! Yes! That's the stuff. The verses don't crawl out of tidy account books and logical proofs. They are dredged up from the roaring dark, from the chaotic sea-swell in your blood. You chase a feeling, a rhythm, an impossible image. That’s where life is. The rest is just waiting.
Sophia: And you chased that feeling to its very limit, did you not?
Dylan: (Shrugs, the smirk returning) I suppose I did. I lived on that pendulum Carl speaks of. I tried to see how far it could swing before the rope frayed. When you’ve poured out every last drop of sense you have in you, what else is there to do but embrace the other side? One must make a mark, after all. Even if it’s just a tally on a bar napkin. I think I distinguished myself in that regard.
Carl: You distinguished yourself by embodying the principle perfectly. Your final act was not one of morality, but of archetype. It was the pendulum reaching its most extreme point. In a life dedicated to the profound sense of poetry, you concluded with an act of supreme, transcendent nonsense. A flight into the irrational to escape the unbearable weight of being. It wasn't a failure; it was a completion of the arc.
Sophia: So you see, the old dilemma, ‘to be or not to be,’ is perhaps the wrong question. It implies a choice between existence and oblivion. But our condition—our Dasein—is that we are already here. The real question is how we inhabit this state of being.
I've just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record.
— Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Dylan: You inhabit it by holding on for the ride.
Carl: And by understanding that the ride itself, the very swing from the rational peak to the irrational abyss, is the meaning. To deny one in favour of the other is to live a half-life. True being is found in the tension of the swing.
Sophia: Precisely. It is not about choosing between sense and nonsense, but about having the courage to live in the space between. To acknowledge the logical structures that build our world and to honor the chaotic dreams that give it color and fire. To be is to be the pendulum in motion, feeling the pull of both extremes, knowing that in that constant, dizzying arc, we find what it truly means to be alive.
(A quiet understanding settles over the table. Dylan leans back, a look of peaceful exhaustion on his face. Carl sips his tea, a flicker of satisfaction in his eyes. The great pendulum of the cosmos continues its silent, endless swing.)
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