Balancing Act

After I finished reading A Fine Balance, I was wondering how someone who liked The Fountainhead so much could find herself in the same perplexity about this book. Where one talks about the individual as the ultimate being, the other talks about duty, fate, and the lack of individual will when confronted with circumstances. Perhaps this is why the individual spirit, will, whatever, is so enticing – because it means that there is possibly a way to control a situation, and that we don’t have to succumb to Fortuna’s twisted plan. The individual will, if provoked, can rise beyond and above society.

Well, this is what I would like to believe, but really it is not pessimistic in acknowledging that it’s not possible. To acknowledge the oppression, the bad, the unfair parts of society, and then to rise yourself above that and not society altogether, well that’s a feat probably worth pursuing. We need society, we need people, and circumstances. Duty is necessary, if only to hold ourselves in boundaries for others; without duty, there is no responsibility, no expectation, and if there is not that, we will constantly be in a state of wondering where we have come to and why and what for. But up to what point shall duty be upheld? Duty, as Mistry said, made people irrational, made them blind to something that could otherwise have been simple. Duty perpetuated the unbearable web of responsibility, poverty, loss and oppression. So much so that even in our lives, we can sometimes predict the loss that will befall us. Maybe, at times, we make it happen. Are we doomed to repeat history? When discussing the concept of fighting for freedom with a friend, I found myself arguing against it, at least in one’s personal life. I didn’t actually believe that freedom was not worth fighting for, but my questions were real, and they continue to perplex me. I am afraid that one will continue to fight, and that history will continue on, and that the individual will will be faced with a huge mountain that it can’t budge. Perhaps if I saw people breaking histories in their own way, I can be convinced. But at the moment, I can’t help but question who to fight for; it can’t be a duty to one’s self, because the self is already unrecognizable in this fight – how does one continue to fight without hating one’s self?