A Way of Being Free

We therefore become separated from our true selves. Then even beauty can seem repugnant. Then, we no longer recognise who we are, and we forget what we used to be, what states we sometimes inhabited, what extended moments of awareness. It is those who are scared of reality, of their own truths, of their own histories, those who are secretly sickened by what they have become, who are alarmed by the strange mask-like faces that peer back at

What if by sheer repetition we become the person we most often pretend to be? Does that mean there is no authentic self? Are we made of habits, compressed by time, like layered rocks?

Never move far from the alpha of life.

He was born in Nigeria, and lives in London.

He has been a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and is an honorary fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1997, he was awarded an OBE in 2001.

The recipient of many honorary doctorates, he is a vice-president of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented with the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum for his outstanding contribution to the Arts and cross-cultural understanding in 1995.

His work has been translated into 26 languages and has won numerous international prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore International Literary Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize.

BEN OKRI has published many books, including The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1991.

They have been widely referenced and still remain much quoted online.

I had been writing these private and public meditations since the eighties.