Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions

by Russell Brand

I can’t take the hard edges of this world, this world I still can’t fully commit to, after forty-one years and with a baby on the way. Luckily there is a wind chime tinkling away in a tangled melody, just behind me, I think in some sort of gestural vegetable garden. And I know and you know that dancing sound and dancing light, in myth at least, are signs of the presence of a higher thing. And if there are no signs? If there are no higher things? Then why should we continue with our meetings and our traffic jams and our parasites? If these things signify nothing and are just fully automated emblems of only themselves what is the point of theatre and poems or schools and advertising agencies? There is no point. But I know and you know (don’t you?) that there is beneath the shash of thought and the wrought ascent and bilious plunge of feeling, some code of which the Sufis sung. Christ was, even if not the Son of God, surely not a blithering idiot, coming up with notions while picking at his nails. Whether you believe that Mohammed, peace be upon him, was the last prophet or not, there are evident truths in the prophecy that can scarcely be dismissed as babble.