Creating In A Broken World

by Sari Molintas

"The nostalgia of writing: the ache for a home to which one cannot return."

Trafficking in Nostalgia, Exie Abola

As an outro of sorts – an exit from my first semester of formal philosophical education – I would like to revisit here the concept that has resounded in me the most since it was first introduced in class: Gabriel Marcel and his idea of our broken world.

The world being broken isn’t something that is new to any of us, as impossible to deny as it is. We all bear witness to its many forms every single day: injustice, discrimination, poverty, the examples are endless. It isn’t a question of the brokenness, but a question of what we choose to do about that brokenness – how we react to that reality. Ultimately, this is what makes us different from one another.

Many would decide to, in the well-worn sense of the phrase, “do something about it.” They would join organizations that address social concerns, or donate what they can to foundations whose efforts are directed to “making the world a better place.” Some would choose to see it as “ganyan talaga,” a situation out of their control or influence. They believe that they are born into a world where it simply is the way it is, and they will die in a world with little to no changes. And there were others still would find ways to escape the brokenness, to elude the inescapable.

Until very recently, I used to think of myself as an escapist. I never denied that the world was broken, but I wanted to distance and distract myself from that knowledge. And it was easy to divert my attention. Contemporary society has done much to keep our broken the world the way it is, by devising countless means for us to get lost in our own tiny little spaces.

I used to believe that I constructed and maintained my space through writing. After all, writing helped me create my personal refuge where I could make sense of all the things that were happening in my life, my secret haven where all the things I longed for could suddenly exist. When I wrote, I disappeared into my sanctuary of words, where the endings that could only be vividly imagined – and never truly experienced – could temporarily be real to me.

I began to consider writing as escape in its most total, all-consuming form.
But now I’m beginning to realize that I was wrong.

* * *

It was a Friday when I first heard the paragraph that would make this outro possible. I was sitting in the back of a crowded room, while the writer himself read the words out from the afterword of his newly published book: “The nostalgia of writing,” he read, “the ache for a home to which one cannot return.” The words resounded in me the whole night, and much later, when I read the words to myself in my dorm room, I was suddenly reminded strongly of Marcel and his exigency for transcendence.

Maybe that’s what it really meant, I thought to myself. Maybe the exigency for transcendence is like a longing to return home, and maybe what home really means is a world that is less broken.

It made perfect sense to me in that moment, although now the idea seems to be a bit difficult to put into words. Perhaps the best way for me to describe it is that I realized that no matter what the original intention, in the essence of creation – be it the creation of a painting, a song, an essay – what we are really doing is slowly bridging the gaps of our broken world. Not only because any creation has the potential to bring people together, but because we give ourselves to our creations. And when we put our creations out into the world, we are breaking out of our tiny spaces.

While our individual efforts may seem small, perhaps even insignificant in totality, they are meaningful, because every step we take out of our own space and towards others is a step that makes our world less disconnected. And while we may not end up achieving what it is we hoped to do – since, after all it is a home “to which one cannot return” – but we can at least be comforted by the knowledge that we tried to do something to leave the world less broken than it already was.