Reality: something that constitutes a real or actual thing, as distinguished from something that is merely apparent.
Apparent: according to appearances, initial evidence, incomplete results, etc; ostensible rather than actual.
Ostensible: outwardly appearing as such; professed; pretended.
It was just any other day of rehearsal for the director of the play – his actors were giving him trouble and he was forced, every 5 minutes, to question why and how he had been driven to do this for a living. And then, just as his male lead delivered his climactic speech, his rehearsal was interrupted by six people dressed ostentatiously and with white painted faces. They claimed to be characters from an incomplete story – characters who had been given life but whose story the author had never completed.
In the midst of a two-hour-long interaction between the bewildered director and the larger than life characters, there was a profound moment when one of the characters asked the director the deceivingly simple question, “Who are you?” Ineffectively, the director replied, “I am… me,” and shrugged. He then asked the character who he was to which the character told about himself as defined by the events of the incomplete story that he was domed to inhabit for eternity.
What is reality? – the character questions. Is the director’s world real or is his? Our world is subject to changes due to time and circumstances so that who we are now is very different from who we will be next year, next week, tomorrow, or even in the next moments. On the other hand, the character will never change because his world has been determined to be a certain way forever. Is not then our world the illusion and their world the reality? If passing time changes us so much, and if our answers to question ‘Who are you?’ constantly change, is not our life in every moment merely an illusion that is shattered as every moment passes?
I left with the director’s frantic cries of ‘Real!’ and the character’s assertive cries of ‘Make-Believe!’ still ringing in my ears. And as I walked around the streets of a place that, despite being part of the same city in which I live, seemed like part of a whole different world that I had made my own for the few days I was there, I was forced to see the truth that’s hidden somewhere in that character’s assertions.
Illusion: something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality; something that deceives.