i've lived much of my life through daydreams, books, and films. i was thinking how little direct experience i've had of the things that have come to be part of my sense of self and  world. yet the things i experience all feel direct, sometimes more potently in the form of art. i guess i've had enough experience of the tangible world to experience parts of it i'll never be. i saw a film today called departures, about a suicide prevention monk in japan who was in a world of trouble himself, and looked to the people who came to him to prevent their own suicide to give him reason to live, while he continued to drink and work himself toward a second heart attack. 
he asked one of his potential suicides why do you want to die? because the waiting gets unbearable. and the monk was quiet. he seemed to be busy waiting himself.
the monk said to the camera, we live in an irrational world, where you are born and then you die. we're given life without choice and have to struggle along the path to death. it's a very irrational thing. when a girl said, life must have some meaning, he said, i don't know, does a river have meaning? i imagined her silently saying, but we are human, not river.
he said he saw suicides multiply, one by one. i thought that was an odd phrasing. one multiplied by one is one. he seemed ineffective in coming up with good reasons to live. you could see him trying weakly and giving up after a few desultory words. he just said, you'd have no more life to reason with, you would have nothing more to ask, and certain people would live the rest of their lives with the pain of your death. i wondered how many lives he had kept living. and then he would go to the disco and get wasted, then back to the hospital, then tell his wife, i just have to change my values. strange dude, that monk. i thought of what i expected of a film with a japanese suicide prevention monk, and i never thought he would be a slow suicide himself. we have ideas about monks, and japan, and other cultures, formed of fantasies. it's an irrational world and we keep asking rational questions, irrationally. 
then i saw dance of the forest spirits, about pygmies in the congo, living in the path of bulldozers seemingly unaware, except for a few items of brand name clothes, continuing their lives, knowing the white's are coming, within a days walk, and knowing they won't move, they can't live in the world of money, outside the forest being cut down everywhere around them. 
my life today is one walk with a golden retriever, sitting in a bed watching the sun move, and movies, and hoping my feet are viable to continue walking as i want in this life i found myself living in, like a daydream in the flesh.
some people live rational lives in a rational world, though, don't they?