Yet We Keep Seeking

I DIDN’T THINK IT WOULD BE CLEVER TO venture onto the Chennai roads flooded by the monsoon rains, but the meeting had been postponed for too long. We really had to talk to the architect, the contractor, and the engineer as the new fittings for the kitchen, bathrooms, and bedrooms needed to be picked. The orien­tation of the counter island in the new home had to be decided once and for all: should it benefit the cook, by facing the stove, or should it privilege the eaters on the stools, and face the window or the roofs of Besant Nagar?

As my mother-in-law, pencil in hand, metic­ulously leaned over the blueprints of the new apartment complex rising through the rubble of the house where my wife grew up, for an instant I felt the familiar shudder of excitement instilled by the idea of change. Gazing at the heavy dark clouds beyond the tall window, above the busy heads of the architect, the builder, and the engi­neer, I sensed a jolt as I visualised brand new cabi­nets, a tidy living room, spic and span bedrooms awaiting somewhere, there, in the future.

I could see them all in my mind’s eye. I could presciently feel the excitement that will no doubt possess us once we walk for the first time into the newly furnished apartment. I was sensing that thrill for novelty known as neophilia: the addiction to change.

At the same time, there, in that rainy morn­ing spent in a builder’s office in Chennai designing sliding doors for the pantry, I couldn’t erase from my mind the image of a dusty and broken commode in the abandoned bathroom on the ground floor of the building recently torn down. I had gone to visit those ruins with a specific mission in mind: in order to accept change, I needed to witness with my eyes the remnants of the dwelling. You must look at change in the face.

Some psychologists suggest, as already happens in the traditions of many cultures around the world, that it’s useful to remain in the presence of the life­less bodies of departed loved ones in order to fully accept their passing. You have to see and smell death, you have to sit with it, look at it, not hide it and conveniently remove it from the public view.

Such removal can lead to new complications, like underestimating the irreversible gravity of eternal loss, making the homicidal violence that creates deaths more carelessly viable, as is the case in American culture which has side-lined the ritual importance of funerals for the collective psychological equilibrium. If you see and respect death, you see and respect life.

As important as witnessing the lifeless bodies of your beloved, it’s equally urgent to realise with your own eyes, nostrils and ears that a place that had emo­tional meaning for you is no longer there. Change must be acknowledged. Gone is the window you gazed out from in the still afternoons, no more veranda where you spent long evenings chatting with relatives, the dining room where long breakfasts welded the family spirit has also disappeared. Everything changes.

This is why I thought it would help me get closure to witness the destroyed house which I still pictured as whole, just like when I arrived to visit it the first time many years ago, when I came to see the woman who would become my wife. I remember the dizzy trepidation of being enamoured, standing there before ringing the bell, taking in the intense fragrance of the jasmine tree soar­ing in front of her home, as it infused my elation with a new olfactory memory.

Before I had finally been allowed to visit her two-floor house, my girlfriend must not have been yet certain that I was the one since, when I arrived to visit the city—she insisted on calling Madras—she hid me away in a guest room above the Boat Club, where my still non-Indianised tummy was taught a rough lesson by local feisty bacteria.

Fortunately, the clandestine nature didn’t last too long but, as I sat in the contractor’s office 15 years later, I thought about my own change from clandestine lover with an upset stomach to proper mappillai, a devoted son-in-law who helps in choosing the interior décor of the in-laws’ new apartment, sharing the sudden thrill of change that comes with the whole operation.

Yet, in a flash, I also saw the long-term meaningless of it all. The new fittings, the bathrooms, the shining new apartment complex that in a few decades would become again an old home to be torn down, just like the very house which infused my in-laws with a quiver of change when they first moved in on December 1, 34 years ago.

And just like that old me—retching away in the bathroom at the Boat Club on the banks of the Adyar river—changed over the years into the integrated velle or gora choosing the new fittings, that same me will one day (possibly in a very distant future) be no more, as the ultimate change always awaits.

When the monsoon rain subsided, and the architectural chatter interrupted my existential musings with the imperative choice of flowery tiles for the terrace, I thought about how we insist on our obsession for changing the unchangeable. Because we must, somehow. It makes the journey more pleasant, it distracts us from realising that every expedition into existence ends the same way.

As the driver ventured into streets now turned into replicas of Venice canals, the car rippling waves to the edge of the buildings’ walls, I evoked the scent of that jasmine tree still standing in front of where the house used to be, still pro­viding an illusion of perpetuity, a fragrance of delusional timelessness which I know will end too. For, of course, everything changes. And ev­erything ends. Even lovely urban jasmine trees.

WHILE RUMINATING THESE ideas, I considered how I changed 20 some years ago from being a journalist to becoming an author. I now even pompously present myself as such on social media bio tags. “Author”. Hah! It sounds so pretentious. And yet the change has happened. From the impor­tant pursuit of facts that must be reported in the now threatened journalistic profession, to the artistic effort of investigating truths that go beyond the facts, in novels, narrative personal essays, and stories shrouding under the façade of fiction the lessons taught by life.

The reason I choose “author” over the ge­neric “writer,” or the more precise “novelist” or “essayist” is because the word comes from the Latin root, the verb augere which means “to increase,” “to originate” but, most clearly, it means “to grow,” in the sense of taking care of something in order for it to grow.

Tending, nurturing, this is what authors do, like sentence botanists, word gardeners accom­panying change.

And authors undoubtedly grow their texts, be it an article, a personal essay like this one, a chapter, a script, a play, a song, a short story, a book. Authors are there, in the act of augere, allowing the idea to grow, feeding it, fertilising it, clipping and pruning. Changing.

The authorial act is the reaffirmation and celebration of the concept of change. The au­thor believes that it can explain transforma­tion, while the text itself is shifting, improv­ing, getting closer to the best possible form in which the concept encapsulating that modifi­cation can be expressed.

If authors are authentic in what they augur then they gain authority (italicised words share the same Latin root) in a vertiginous delusion of meaning, and in the misplaced belief in the existence of change, whereas change is just a temporary transformation, a game, a cycli­cal merry-go-round keeping us entertained and busy—change as a toy used to test us, to amuse us in the pastime of life, which, when observed from a perspective that goes beyond a single lifetime, shows that change is a lot more meaningless than our short-sighted view allows us to understand.

Change will come, tomorrow. Change can happen, now. But the past, notoriously, can’t change. However, as we will see more clearly at the end of this text, the past is also open to how we remember it or decide to interpret it. The past, or how we look at it, can change al­most as easily as the future.

The future, allegedly, is a time more open to change, as its course depends on the actions of the present. Yet, once those actions are set in mo­tion, the future becomes less changeable than we imagine. The present is in constant transfor­mation, its variables so open to improvisation.

We thirst for change, we seek it, we beg our leaders to provide a blueprint for the new fit­tings of our lives while we drive worriedly in the monsoon flooded canals of our existence. At times, our leaders provide the dreams, the promises, even the blue­prints, sometimes even the change. But they rarely deliver the apartment complex in which to enjoy those changes. Perhaps if we remembered the illusion of change, we might be less likely to fall for misleading prom­ises of transformation.

Yes, Heraclitus, I know, I know, there’s nothing permanent except change. The world is in a constant state of flux. Yes, yes, we are always “becoming” but never “being”. Panta rei all the way, my Greek bro. Yes, “everything flows,” dude. As much as we keep trying, “no person ever steps in the same river twice.” Actually, even as we step into the river once, the water around our ankles is already changing. That ontologist from Southern Italy, Parmenides, who believed in the reality of static “being,” was sooo 5th century BCE, wasn’t he?

Time for that philosophical infodump, as Greek philosophers have literally lost their minds chasing after the topic of change. If the unique essence of real­ity is water, where everything started, Thales argued, how come there’s such a multiplicity of beings? How can we explain the existence of a substance always true to itself, but also a living and changeable thing?

Heraclitus came to the rescue explaining the substance of the Being is trans­formation: God is change, basically. But Heraclitus went beyond, understand­ing that everything changes, but also nothing changes, as the uphill road is equivalent to the downhill road. It is hunger that lets you enjoy a full belly. Few are awake to this reality, most are asleep, living in a dream, prisoners of the delusions of struggle, incapable of seeing the unity of it all, beyond the veil of change.

Heraclitus, the philosopher of change, argued that harmony is the perennial mutation and continued contrast of the opposites, brought about by change. Aristotle added that below constant change lies a substratum: young beings who get old do change, but they’re still the same beings. Becoming is the transforma­tion of an entity whose essence is unchanged.

Centuries later, the German philosopher Hegel picked up the baton and explained that change is always a birth or a death, something that is not yet, and something that will be, something that has been or that is no more. As Austrian intellectual Ludwig Wittgenstein famously stated: “Philosophy is just a by-product of misunderstanding language.” And so Western thinkers continued to complicate things until the arrival of Italian philosopher Emanuele Severino (who left us four years ago), a contemporary scholar who understood the limits of European thought on this topic.

The theorist from Brescia believed that “becoming” or the idea of change is at the very base of the modern conception of the world, just like neophilia is at the heart of the engine of capitalism: consumerism. The two are the same: obsession for change and love of the new. Fodder for cyclical discontent which keeps economies alive.

In fact this is why, Severino argued, modern man is living in a constant state of anguish, scared by the inexplicable appearance from nothingness and disap­pearance into nothingness of entities. Change excites us, and change terrifies us.

Which is why we seek some “Immutable” values: to soothe the anxiety caused by the manifestations of change. In other words, we seek rules and laws in the pro­cesses of change in order to escape the apparent irrationality and unpredict­ability of it all. Fear drives us, as usual. And this explains religion, but, equally, the reassuring blanket of Enlighten­ment and our hopeful faith in Science.

Severino pointed out that revo­lutionary thinkers like Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi or German phi­losopher Friedrich Nietzsche have slowly pulverised our certainties on the foundations of European thought. They kindled the beginning of a new change: the death of Truth as we’d known it.

This is why Severino arrived at a new interpretation of Parmenides’ belief in an unchanging reality, and on the static nature of the Essence, which sounds quite familiar in India. Everything is eternal, all changes, but nothing changes. What can change, i.e. what is born and what dies, is also eternal.

Nothing changes, Severino argued, it just disappears from “the horizon of events,” but it continues to exist in a dimension which is not perceivable by our dimension.

So, the new fittings and tiles in the house in Besant Nagar are already there before they will manifest themselves (if my mother-in-law and I can agree on the final choice) and they will be there after they disappear, once they’ll be demol­ished for yet a new house (or a forest, a desert, a hill, a lagoon) to rise in its place, in the future. Although I’m not sure either my mother-in-law nor the architect and engineer would find this insight especially useful for the task at hand.

I wish I could tell them that, adopting a very 20th century simile, Severino said that life is like a film that captures a movie in separate stills: the single frames existed before being made visible by the light of the projector, and the frames continue to exist, in the reel, even after being projected on the screen. Reality is dynamic. In other words, conscience is fragmented in an infinity of frames, each containing the present event and the memory of past events. Finally, a Eu­ropean thinker grasped conclusions already explored in a more poetic manner in the Yoga Vasistha, along with other Vedic texts which have already investigated what the nature of change is to us humans.

Yet we keep seeking. Ultimately, we can’t elude the change of the unchangeable.

This December, I found myself walking from Liberty Square in Tbilisi, smelling the hormones of upheaval exuded in the freezing night, as Georgian pro-European Union protesters waved starry flags in front of a Parliament illuminated by the spray of pro-Russia police hydrants.

Later, in the news, I observed the ripples of change on the faces of different factions which transformed the course of history in Syria, after fifty years of a one-family rule, while the streets of Seoul filled with South Korean protestors cheering wildly the vote to impeach their presi­dent, who had tried to impose martial law.

Hopes of transformation are rallying in Washington DC, where on January 20, 2025, the 47th US president guarantees he’ll start bringing about a much-announced transmu­tation that scares some and instils others with the hope of a real revolution.

In times of global shifts such as these, it might be useful to remember our very hu­man delusion of changing the unchangeable, of cheerfully seeking new fittings for a kitchen that will inevitably decay, of cheering for the new shiny apartment complex, while realising that one day it will be become an old home to be torn down. Again and again. Pursuing some changes and trying to abscond from others. Because we must, somehow.

2025 New Year IssueA Personal HistorychangingDivine DelusionEmanuele SeverinoHeraclitusunchangeable