Janus The Recluse

Janus opened his eyes. No work today. He had given it up. There was no fulfilment in conventional work for him. Other people might find fulfilment in work, from working in a team, from power and influence over others, or because they had nothing better they wished to achieve. He did not feel superiority. After all he was not the only one who felt as he did. There were many. People were different. He just happened to be creative, others liked repetition and security, others hungered for power.

Janus forced himself not to think of the future, the heavy weight of guilt and failure which was waiting poised to flood over him if only he opened the door to it. Failure for his lack of discipline, his inability to remain in line like so many others did and his inability to concentrate. His mind was not sharp. It was slow and fluid, drifting from thought to thought, unable to stay focused on any one task. One thing he knew. HE was not a “robot”. He was a human being.

The guilt was the shame of non-achievement and of not even trying any more. In his life physical needs had all been provided for him, far more indeed than he needed. Mental succour had been far less forthcoming but artistic and entertainment requirements had been generously provided over the Vidnet, so much so that it had only whetted his appetites for more. The system had given him the mental stimulants which gave him the motivation and the imagination to want to overthrow the system. The guilt was that he was no longer contributing to the system which, even with all its faults, had succoured him. Now he had shut the system off. He was giving nothing to it now but it surely deserved something in return from him. The work he had done in the past was hardly sufficient to pay for all that he received. He was a parasite on the system that had suckled him.

The guilt was more than that. It was guilt for all the people who still slaved away in the system. Why should they be doing all that for him, wasting their own lives for him when he should be doing something to help them, to make life easier for them?

Janus wanted to help. He wanted to change the system for the better, to improve the lives of the people who suffered. But he had considered it before many times. There was nothing he could do. There was no way to affect the system. There were too many people in it. What could one do against all the millions? Even if all the millions voted for him to be the President of the International Alliance or the Emperor of the Martan Empire he would still be powerless to change the system. Everybody had to change before the system could change.

He felt guilt for the people who suffered physically, the outcasts who were hardly even a part of the system, the people in the poor dependent countries across the oceans and the few homeless, unemployed, of the large cities of Gallanol left behind by the system, and officially forgotten by it. They were not supposed to exist.

Janus had wasted much of his precious life pondering his own guilt and failure. He had also wasted much time on wondering how he might confront it and solve it. To confront it he had tried to train and improve himself. It had not worked. To solve it he had analysed the problems of the world – social, political, economic and considered ways in which they might be solved. He had known what he thought ought to be changed and how things should be run, but he was not sure of that any more. He came up against the insurmountable wall. He alone could not put his hopes into action. There was nothing achievable. He could try for the remaining short-lived decades of his life but his efforts would be futile. That course was commendable, honourable, but it was not a course he could take knowing that it would achieve so little.

Janus kept his door shut. He would not think of these things. He knew what he had to do now. It was selfish and insular but it had value and not just to him. Somehow Janus felt that it was what he had been meant to do. The reason why he had been placed on this planet, on this, in so many ways, privileged continent. To live a life here without taking advantage of the possibilities it offered would be such a waste. He did not know why or how he had been created or whether some superior being had created him for his own purpose but he did know that he had been created with enormous potential and that if he did not feed and use that potential his life would have been a vain waste like so many other countless lives around him and before him and still to come. There was little time to waste. He had already in his short life, wasted so much time. Janus corrected himself. It was not all wasted. He had to experience the pain of a meaningless routine, of a directionless existence, and the anguish of wasted time and lost opportunities to achieve understanding. So that his projects would have meaning and direction. So that he would have something to say. So that he could really feel what it was to be a human being, fragile and unimportant in the scale of things.

Janus felt ready to get out of bed. He needed the soul food of creative activity. The early morning was often the best time, after it became fully light. The natural time to rise, not like the office workers who had to get up whether or not they felt like it, often in the dark during the winter season or on shift work. Janus had no desire to stay supine and thinking. He wanted his thoughts to go straight into his work. A pile of books were stacked next to his bed. He could have reached out and selected one. They were for the times when he needed ideas or stimulation. The artist could not work without an open mind. He had opened his mind to everything which interested him. He followed his inclinations in patterns which would have seemed confused to anyone but himself. But there was an order to it, like the pattern of a fulfilling life should be. There were gaps in the process of being painted in. Some gaps lay empty for years and then suddenly with a flash of insight Janus would begin to fill them in. It might be another eight months or three years before he returned to a particular gap. The knowledge and influence in he gained in that intermediate period was akin to the work which he put out and just as important.

Janus swivelled on his bed and landing his feet on the floor he stood up. There was a chore to be done before he could continue his work. To delay that and perhaps unconsciously to gain inspiration he went to the window of the large flat he had acquired and looked out. A grey but clear Martan morning. He looked out over parts of the city. His flat was seven floors up in a tall block. There were many floors above him, but this one had afforded an adequate view as there were no buildings quite so high as his own flat in the immediate vicinity of his line of vision. In the distance where there were very tall buildings was the ancient heart of the City, where the Emperors had their Palaces and Public Buildings. Now they were museums of sorts, much of them had been developed many times over the centuries, bits added, bits knocked down. There were covered walkway storeys high, revolving towers and magnificent stone carvings, done in giant proportions. Over all of that was a giant dome, which protected some of those buildings from pollution and the elements, and had in the past protected them from perceived external threats which never materialised in the days of national rivalry. Somewhere across there the River Senl ran through the dome. It was a magnificent view, his reason for making the attempt to rent the flat here where rents and property values not far from the heart of the International Economy were high. How long he would be able to sustain the payments he did not know but these were practical thoughts which he was not to think of now. He had banished such considerations from his life in order to get on with the task of living.

Janus turned away from the window and picked up the items of clothing on his reclining chair. He put on the same trousers and shirts he had been wearing the day before. Smelling under the armpits, he decided the shirt was still not dirty. It was a multi-coloured shirt, which he would never have worn for work in his working days. Some people wore them after work. Janus had liked the look of those people. They gathered socially in certain bars and clubs and seemed actually to enjoy each others company.

He had thought once that he would like to join those people and had spent some time conversing with them. However, he had known none of them and saw no potential means of introduction. Janus had since concluded that many of them were not quite the friendly people he had first thought. They congregated together because they all wanted to be with young beautiful people who like themselves wanted respite from the rigours of the working life, sharing in the excitement of being rebellious. Janus had met two of them eventually in one of his employments. The young man had been quite attractive in his appearance but his careless and offhanded manner had frightened Janus. The young woman was quite gorgeous to behold. Janus had been polite and relaxed when he first met her but she looked through him as if he was not there. The truth which Janus had reached was that some at least of these people cared nothing for anyone but themselves. Nonetheless Janus admired the way these people dressed, the music they enjoyed. They provided one of the main themes in his art. He idealised them as cultural revolutionaries, the vanguard of his new society, a society based on social development and artistic expression rather than the philistinism of education, efficiency, production and consumption that dominated.