Two Hundred and Forty Two

Why would anyone want to go on living in this hell?  Something is better than nothing, I suppose.  No, I don’t.  Not if it’s this thing. 

Suicide tempts those of us who think death would be an escape from a miserable life—and life is miserable for most of us most of the time.  The knowledge that we ourselves make it miserable makes it hell.  The few of us who fear death do so because they think it’s not the end of life.  Not only do they believe there will be an afterlife, but even worse, eternal life. 

Even the few of us whose lives are good would kill themselves if they could be sure their afterlives would be not only equally good, but better, because eternal—because although their own lives are good, they know life is miserable for most people most of the time, and the knowledge that we can’t help them makes life miserable for us as well.  Those whose lives are good want to escape hell in the next life just as they have in this.  We’d all kill ourselves if we knew what death is.

Is death the end?  We’ve always believed nothing is ever lost, but only undergoes a change.  It’s obvious that everything changes in this world of change, so I don’t know why evolution was ever considered controversial.  The only questions are how things change, and how much.

Westerners we call religious used to believe we leave the real world—the perfect, and therefore unchanging, world—to be born into this world of change, wander it a while and then return to the real world when we die.  Easterners we call religious used to believe the same.  The only difference is that they wander through several lives until they wean themselves from their desire for the illusions of this world as a baby weans itself from its mother’s milk, or an addict from his drug.

Most of us used to believe that throughout all these changes something remains the same—something we used to call the soul.  Others believe the change is complete, whether it's for better or worse.  Whether nothing of us that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange

Or great Cæsar, dead and turned to clay

Stops a hole to keep the wind away

the change is complete because nothing is eternal.  Perhaps not even that.

Two Hundred and Forty One

Rachel wept, and Mary wept; but she never wept, even though she had as much cause as they.  More, because they were consoled by the thought that god saw their tears, even though no one else did.  She said weeping is a display for others, a bid for their sympathy; and she’d seen too much, knew too much, to expect sympathy.  She knew what I am only now learning.

There is no consolation. 

I thought I'd found it in philosophy.  She thought I had, too, and could teach her to find it there as well.  But I misled her. 

Or did I?  I think she knew I was a fool, and loved me anyway.  

Two Hundred and Forty

The universe is infinite, but we are finite.  How then should we live? 

Ah, love, let us be true to one another!
For the world
Which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

But the world is what we made it because we couldn't love one another.  If we can’t live with the infinite sadness that comes with knowing this, we must die.

Two Hundred and Thirty Nine

If I want to die, why am I still alive?

Because what I want is not to die, but to be fully alive—knowing what life is, and what I am.

This is what the wise have always wanted to know.  But they usually assumed they can never know it while they’re alive because while they live their minds are clouded by desire.

Socrates said philosophy is a training for dying—a purification of the soul from the body’s attachment to this world in preparation for its return to the real world from which it came.  Then we’ll once again know all that we knew before we were born into this world of illusion.  He assumed we’re strangers in this world—souls that wander through it for a while, lost, until we return home.  A strange illusion to imagine this world is an illusion in which we alone are real.  No wonder the wise have seldom loved the world.

I remember that moment when I lay under my grandfather’s apple tree, looking up at the blue sky, and knew for the first time what I was, and what it was, and felt love for it, and for my self—the self that knew it—flood into me.  Ever since that moment I’ve wanted to know it better, as the religious once wanted to know their god—in a union, or reunion, of self and other in which we have perfect knowledge of the other because self and other are one.

Yet all my life I’ve stood back from the world in order to see it entire.  To become one with it—to lose myself in it—would have been disrespectful.  The other needs the self to know it and love it, as the religious used to say god needs us to know and love him.

Now I tell myself I want to die because I’m tired of the world.  It hasn’t changed, but I have.  I’ve seen too much and know too much.  I know not only what it is, but what it could be; and what it is isn’t enough for me any longer.

I tell myself it could change­—everything changes­—and it does change; but only in small ways, and usually for the worse.

We made the world what it is, so we should be able to change it by doing better, being better.  We tried to, over and over again, and always failed.  The golden bowl is broken and can't be mended.

Two Hundred and Thirty Eight

We are all equally wise in the beginning.  Those we call wise are those who remember the most of what we all knew in the beginning.  Those we call fools are those who forget, but choose to believe it doesn’t matter because we have wise men who tell us all we need to know.

Those who fools call wise know this world and how to live in it, but not how to make it a world worth living in.

The only thing we do not and cannot learn in this life is how to live.

We never learned how to live with the knowledge that everything we know is only a guess because we are finite, and the universe in infinite.  Guesses become dangerous if we believe—or choose to believe— they’re real in the same way we are real.

Our guesses seem more plausible as we learn more, and refine them accordingly; but they remain guesses because we're finite, and will always be limited in what we know.

To our senses the world appears made of objects like us; but when scientists use their instruments these objects no longer appear solid, but particles in a void.  Fools now assume that what scientists see with their instruments is more real than what we see with our senses; but both are equally aspects of reality—or equally illusory, if we assume one or the other is the infinite reality we’re unable to see because of our own limits.

We know that what we know is, and always will be, less than what there is to know because we are finite and what there is to know is infinite.  That knowledge frightens us, so we pretend that while we may not know everything, we know enough because we have wise men to tell us all we need to know.  We want to trust those men as children trust, or want to trust, their parents; but just as we eventually learn our parents aren't infallible, the more we learn, the more aware we become that our wise men don’t know everything. And that frightens us.

Not the fear of death, but the fear of what we don’t know is our greatest fear; because we don’t know what death is.

Priests told us death is not the end—we go on living in some afterlife.  We believed them—or rather we suspended our disbelief—because they were wiser than we were.  Now scientists tell us death is the end, and we fear death because we no longer trust our wise men to tell us the truth.

The wise can do no more than make educated guesses based on the evidence available to them, just as we all do.  For most of us, what the wise tell us is a large part of that evidence.  Only fools demand certainty, either of others or themselves, and prefer charlatans who promise them certainty instead of wise men who only make educated guesses.

Americans have always preferred charlatans who promise them certainty.  They elected Trump because they finally lost faith in rulers whom they were fools to have ever trusted—but they still wanted to remain childlike and innocent, so they merely rejected one charlatan for another, even worse one.

Trump believes, or claims to believe, the pandemic will magically disappear because he’s a senile con man.  His supporters believe, or claim to believe, this absurd claim because they want to be innocent children who think wishing will make it so.