Seventy

In order to survive, I had to know them better than they knew themselves. I had to understand why they wanted to destroy themselves, because in destroying themselves they would destroy me too.

Freud said we all want to destroy ourselves. We all want to die, but only in our own way. This isn’t wrong, but neither is it right. 

His theory of the death drive is one that even Freudians find difficult to understand, and most refuse to try. Why would anyone want to die? And yet it’s obvious we do. 

We all destroy ourselves sooner or later. Those who know this have what we used to call a tragic sense of life, something we no longer understand, or claim not to understand, and even claim no longer exists. Freud didn’t understand it, either, but at least he knew it exists.

No one wants to die, but we all kill ourselves sooner or later because what we fear more than death is a life unlived. We want to feel we’ve accomplished something in whatever time we have. Most people feel they’ve wasted their time, and they’re usually right. Most people do what they must in order to survive, not what they know they should and could do, but mere survival isn’t enough. And in despair, they destroy themselves.

It’s not enough to understand the world, said Marx. The goal is to change it. My family, good Marxists all, thought they were changing it for the better, and found they had changed it for the worse. 

Everything we do nowadays only makes what’s already bad worse. Better to do nothing at all, and wait for the fire.  

God gave Noah 
the rainbow sign

No more water
the fire next time