The Path in the Jungle

Imagine you are cutting a path through a jungle. Your tool is a machete, and with it you begin to hack your way through the vines and bushes and branches of trees.

Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.

And yet you press on.

You can see your progress behind you. It seems very minute in the vastness of the jungle. It seems pathetic. It seems like nothing at all.

But it is something, isn't it?

After days or weeks or years of cutting and carving and hacking and slashing your way through the jungle, your path intersects with another path. This path is well-used; you can see the impressions of many feet in the mud. Or perhaps it is red sand, or gravel. Or even concrete or tarmac. This new path--not your path, but the path you have found--leads off into the distance. There you can see, rising above the treetops, the flashing lights of a city. You can see the columns of the city's smoke, and you can hear the honking and the shouting and maybe music or gunshots from its streets.

The city is not so far. And you have been such a long time in the jungle alone. Surely you must go there and see its squalors and its delights and its squalid delights and its delightful squalors for yourself.

And you go to the city, and you stay in the city for a while. Maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe years. Maybe you never leave. Maybe you find what you are looking for in the squalid delights and delights and squalors and delightful squalors and you never feel the need to leave again.

Or maybe you do.

Maybe one day you go back out on that well-established road that leads up to the city. Maybe you don't think anything of it at the time; maybe you're just going on a walk or out to get some air. Or maybe you do remember, thinking back on what it was like to swing that machete over and over and over and over again, leaving mangled plants and the thinnest of trails behind you.

Either way, you happen upon a scar in the jungle. A place where someone has been clearing a path, and where the ever-regenerating vegetation has yet to completely erase the evidence of passage. And you realize that this is the way you have come to the city. You look to the jungle on the opposite side of the road--not your road, not the one you had made but the one that leads to the city you had come to think of as yours, but is not now your city, in this instant--and see that the jungle is whole and unwounded. The jungle is vast, fast, and oblivious.

And maybe that's all you think. Or maybe you become dour at the meaninglessness of your former efforts, and return to your pretty, dirty city a little bit bitter, and that's the end of it. Or maybe you go back to the city and purchase a new machete--your old one having been so rusted and notched and pitted that it would be of no use now, even if you hadn't thrown it away--and you go back to that place opposite your old path and plunge into the jungle again.

Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.

And you ask yourself why you are doing this, and there is no good answer.

You do not know where your trail is headed; maybe it goes nowhere. You do not know if anyone will ever follow you on this trail. There are perfectly good paths that lead to the pretty, dirty city; why not follow them? Why make your own?

And yet you press on.

You sometimes see trails that parallel your own. Trails that near yours, but never quite touch. Or perhaps they do intersect. Sometimes you even see the trail-cutters who are making them. Sometimes you speak to them. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes these parallel trails are covered over in old vegetation, only barely visible as trails at all. Sometimes the sap is still stinking-bitter and the severed leaves have yet to turn brown. There are trails that come close to yours, but your trail is never quite exactly like any of the others.

Is that sufficient?

There are other cities, other well-worn roads. You pass them. And maybe you enter into the second city, or the fifth. And maybe you don't come back out again.

Or maybe you do. And you take up a new machete that will grow just as quickly dull.

And you continue to cut a trail that might be of no use to anyone, not even to you. It might be redundant, or it might lead to nowhere worth going. Your trail ultimately leads away from the light and life of the city, into dangerous wilderness.

And yet you press on.

Or maybe you don't.