Who Am I…?

Who am I? The question often ascends like a tide in my mind but remains unreturned. If ever I, willingly or unwillingly, try to dive on a quest for my identity, I’ll be at a distant spot still with the lingering query, ‘Who Am I?’

Man has always remained a riddle for the world and for himself too. Man – the modern man is nothing but just a dilemma. Hamlet’s monologue “What a piece of work is a man!” serves as a complete reflection of the very concept. Man is neither completely wise nor inadvisable but on the bridge of a middle state. One aspect of his nature cancels out another. He is a mixture of contrary qualities – a paradox.

Alexander Pope in his work, ‘An Essay on Man’ rightly projected that man is a being that is ‘darkly wise’ and ‘rudely great’. He is incompletely wise but takes immense pride in his fractional knowledge thus landing himself in the pit of obliviousness. He is skeptical, unconvinced, and doubtful yet despairingly admirable.

Modern man is a dilemma, ‘To be or not to be’, ‘To do or not to do’. He is always unsure as to which side of himself he should inhabit. He is in doubt to act or rest, to deem himself as god or beast, to prefer his mind or body. He is a chaos of conception and reason, chaos of thought and passion, chaos of devotedness and abomination, chaos of greatness and pettiness. Dangling between heavenly aspirations and earthly existence. His birth is nothing but the beginning of his end and reasoning an apparatus of erring.

He is both the savior and the destroyer, created half to rise and half to fall, open to both good and evil, deeming himself nothing less than a lord of manifestations yet a jest to the world. He is the one who makes plans and yet falls prey to his own misjudgments. He is self-deceived, yet successfully climbs out of all the whirlpools.

Man has towered Alps on Alps and mounted sciences. He has conquered the space, measured the earth, weighed the air, and controlled the tides. There was a time when he was nascent, like a seed in the soil. But today he is ruling the stars above the stars. Ironically, man has touched the heights of glory, dignity and grandeur but still finds himself on the muddled isthmus of a middle state, he has subjugated the entire universe but has failed to resolve the mystery, the enigma of his identity. He still remains the riddle for the world.  He still questions himself ‘Who Am I…?’

“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man”

Alexander Pope

~ QuratulAin Hamza