Two Hundred and Sixty One

I watched the Trump/Biden debate last night, hoping it would be an amusing disaster.  Unfortunately neither said or did anything outrageous enough to stop the show.  After four years of Trump, what used to be considered outrageous is now the norm. 

He spouted his usual nonsense, making Biden sound almost reasonable by comparison.  It’s not that Trump can’t lie convincingly, but that he doesn’t even try because he knows his fans enjoy his antics.  

The pundits who followed their debate, and told the audience what we’d just watched, demonstrated that politicians aren’t the only ones who can no longer think or speak articulately.  Pundits used to be articulate, if not always honest, but now they're neither.    

What will happen when we no longer have this buffoon to distract us?  At first there will be the usual honeymoon period, during which the unrealistic expectations raised by the new president’s campaign promises are crushed by his refusal to keep them.  Then we'll be faced again with the same problems we faced before Trump blundered into the White House and distracted our attention from them with his antics.

I can’t believe anyone really expects things to change for the better when Biden becomes president, which they apparently did expect when Obama became president.  The differences between Obama and his Republican rivals were literally skin deep, but the differences between Biden and Trump are even more superficial, so we'll have to work harder than we usually do to ignore reality when Biden becomes president.     

Two hundred and Sixty

We're children, dying young no matter how long we've lived because we never grow up.

We're orphans, survivors of the storm who’ve been cast away on the shore of that sea from which we came and to which we'll return.

We tell ourselves our parents will come one day to rescue us and take us home.  But they never do.

Eventually we forget from where we came and to where we’re going.  We spend our days playing with each other, and killing each other, because we're children and life is a game.

We also work, building castles out of sand on the sand.  And when the sea washes our castles away, we build them again.

But now we know no one’s coming to rescue us.  There is only the sea.  And after we’ve turned to dust, it will dry up.  Then the seabed, exposed at last when no one’s left to see it, will also turn to dust.

Two Hundred and Fifty Nine

She said if I died, she’d die with me.  Now she’s dead and I’m alive.  I thought of that as I watched Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev's, not Shakespeare’s) earlier tonight.

It’s more difficult to translate a play into a ballet than into any other art, because a play is words and ballet's action.  But Prokofiev understood this play's about youth, and ballet is the ideal art in which to depict the physicality of youth.  Children act before they think, let alone speak.

The young love to live, and live to love.  For them, the end of love is death.  They die when they learn to imitate their quarreling elders. 

When I was young, some learned adult claimed children don’t know they’ll die one day.  Children understand death better than adults do because they’re closer to it, having just begun to live.  It’s life that’s a mystery to them.  Only after they’ve learned to love life do they fear losing it, and tell themselves some part of them lives on after they die.  The young have no need of religion.

When I was young, art was for some of us what religion used to be for most of us.  Now we worship the tribe, which is not religion but superstition.

I tried to kill myself after she died, but I won’t again.  She said she never wept because weeping is a display for others, a bid for their sympathy.  So is suicide.