Inbetweeners

There are mornings when I sit before my computer, the IDE casting its pale glow across the screen. As I trace each line of code with meticulous care, I suddenly feel a fissure opening within me.

My engineering work tolerates no looseness: every bracket aligned, every query flawless, every action justified. It calls for logical clarity, swift execution, and results that can be counted in commercial value. Efficiency here is not virtue but obligation; precision is the price of survival.

Yet when I cross the threshold into writing, I become another creature entirely. Words tumble from me like leaves in a storm; I circle around ideas, chatter like a drunkard in a tavern, inventing stories that dissolve even as I commit them to paper. Here, I am as unlike my work-bound self as Dorian Gray is unlike the painted portrait he hides in the attic.

The pull between these two selves often leaves me in a state of uncertainty. In one moment I am the meticulous engineer, finding security in clarity; in another, the restless dreamer, chasing visions without limit. As though my mind were split, pursuing different ends with different modes of thought, like two lives carried uneasily within one body.

It was The Picture of Dorian Gray that first gave shape to this unease. I think of Basil Hallward, whose devotion to art is tempered by his grasp of reality; of Sibyl Vane, who loses her artistic brilliance the moment she dreams of ordinary love; and of Lord Henry, who intoxicates Dorian with his philosophies of pleasure while contributing nothing of substance himself. Wilde shows how beauty, when pursued as performance alone, drifts fatally away from life. In Sibyl’s decline, I see the cost of forsaking one’s craft; in Dorian’s corruption, the ruin of living only for aesthetics.

If Wilde warns me of the peril of obsession, Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day points to the opposite danger: the slow suffocation of the self through duty. Stevens, the butler, polishes silver until it gleams, sustains order as though his existence depends on it, and in so doing allows the years to slip away. His refusal to acknowledge his longings, his repression of grief, even his halting silence with Miss Kenton, leave him hollowed by the time he confronts what remains of his days. His tragedy is not excess but restraint: the iron grip of professionalism that strangles the warmth of human desire.

Between Wilde and Ishiguro, I glimpse my own dilemma. On one side lies the risk of indulgence: of drowning in imagination until life itself becomes a theatre set. On the other lies the risk of devotion so complete that desire is extinguished. My job demands that I be a Stevens: dedicated, exacting, sober. My writing tempts me to be a Dorian: reckless in pursuit of beauty, careless of consequence. I move between them constantly: one moment the careful servant of order, the next the heedless devotee of imagination.

As I grow older, I realise life was never meant to be singular. It is stitched together from contradictions: duty and desire, pragmatism and passion. Each is a truth of mine, and the only way forward is to acknowledge them both, side by side.

And so, if Dorian embodies the lure of beauty and Stevens the desolation of relentless duty, then to live is not to flee obligation nor to silence longing, but to bear them together - and in that shimmering balance, to find the shape of one’s own self.