One Hundred and Fifty Five

I woke this morning with the words of Major Amberson echoing in my head.  They're actually the Major’s words as spoken by Orson Welles in his film of The Magnificent Ambersons, which so impressed me when I was a child that I read the novel on which it was based.

As he nears the end of his life, the Major becomes uncharacteristically philosophical.  He asks himself what happens to us when we die, and reasons that our souls return to wherever they came from.  The sun is the source of all life on earth, therefore our souls return to the sun.

I knew Tarkington’s novel won the Pulitzer Prize, but I found it inferior to the film.  The Major’s words sounded magnificent when spoken by Welles, but looked banal on the page.  This was perhaps the first time I became aware that a second-rate novel can inspire a great film.   

Now that I'm nearing the end of my own life, my thoughts seem to me as banal as the Major’s.

It’s obvious why the sun was our first god.  He rules the sky, and fertilizes mother earth with rain.  But before the gods there were goddesses.  And before them both, the void.

Egyptologists are puzzled by the fact that Nut was goddess of the sky and Geb, her brother/husband, god of the earth.  But Nut was goddess of the night sky.  The black void overhead was her body, and the stars that filled it were the souls of the dead.  Osiris climbed up a ladder to re-enter his mother’s body and become king of the dead.

The Book of Nut is the earliest known text on astrology and astronomy.  What we separate into religion and science is the study of the night from which we all woke and to which we all return.

One Hundred and Fifty Four

We had our Christmas party yesterday evening.

It wasn’t actually a party.  The last time I worked at the company, Don rented a suite at a local hotel every year and we’d have a real party.  Bob and his wife brought their instruments and played while we all danced and sang Christmas carols.  After I retired, the company lost so many employees that Don stopped holding annual Christmas parties.  Yesterday’s party was just dinner at a restaurant, and only for the employees, not their families.  Not even Don’s wife was there.

Sitting at the table, I became aware of how much the company’s group dynamic has changed because of Nick.

Most of the employees who are gone now had been around Bob’s age, and the new hires are all Nick’s age.  He and the women sat at my end of the table, giggling together, while I sat silent.

I asked myself if I was jealous, but decided that isn't the case.  It’s true I used to be the focus of the group, but only in a negative sense, as the eye is the focus of the hurricane.  Petty quarrels swirled around me, but I refused to be drawn into them.  I thought of myself as the only real adult in the room.  Nick has made himself the focus of the group by being the most childish adult in the room.

He babbles constantly about his favorite comic book heroes, video games, and the pranks he and his 'buddies' play on each other.  He doesn’t do this with the other men in the office.  His audience is the women, who laugh indulgently as they probably do at the antics of their children (The women are all married, with small children).

I might find Nick as amusing as the women do if I didn’t have to work with him.  But even Bob, who never says a critical word about anyone, told me Nick is ‘erratic’ and ‘disorganized’.

One Hundred and Fifty Three

Cogito, ergo sum and sum, ergo cogito.  If I must be a while longer, I must think a while longer.

Scientists now say the question is why there’s something rather than nothing.  It’s an unanswerable question because the distinction is a false one.

What they (we?) call nothing is not an empty void.  It only appears empty to us, just as light appears without color to us until we shine it through a prism.  An apt metaphor because light, with or without color, appears only to us.  Without eyes to see them and ears to hear them, what we call things are only waves moving on the surface of the void, which contains all things just as white light contains all colors.

We imagine the void is empty because it seems so different from us.  But we came from the void, and will return to it.  We are no more than episodes in its history.  For the void does have a history.  It exists in time, just as we do.  It exists because we do, and vice versa.

Once we make a distinction between something and nothing, it’s easy to make a distinction between living and nonliving things.  One error leads to another until finally we create civilisation.

Our earliest philosophers said we are spirits caged in matter.  Death frees us. It would be closer to the truth to say spirit (or life) is a disease of matter.  Once infected, matter begins to decay.

We are parasites, feeding on a world we pretend is lifeless matter in order to avoid judging and condemning ourselves for what we do to it.  We invented gods to forgive us what we do because we can't forgive ourselves.

There is indeed a god-shaped hole in our lives, and nothing can fill it.  Nothing has filled it.

God was a name for what we didn't understand.  The void is a name for what we refuse to understand.

 . 

Life like ours is probably rare, a mutation unique to this planet.  Here it proliferates like a cancer because misery loves company.

Life seems to me tragic, but the lives of other animals most of all because they don’t invent the illusion we call civilisation to avoid seeing what they do.  Other animals do terrible things, but not as terrible as the things we do because they don’t pretend they do them in the service of some greater good, as we do.    

One Hundred and Fifty Two

I wasn’t going to write again.  I was going to lie down, go to sleep and never wake up.  Then Don called and asked me to come back to work. 

Don thought he was doing me a favor, so it would have been rude of me to refuse.  But that’s not why I came back.

I tried to kill myself after she died, and was preparing to try again when Don called and offered me a job.  And then the next time I was preparing to kill myself, he called again.  I know it’s only a coincidence, but it’s uncanny.

The company is dying, so it’s a comfortable place for me to be.  Almost everyone I worked with eight years ago is gone now, and the few who remain know it has no future, so it’s quiet as a funeral.  The only sounds are when Bob or I tell each other a joke, and we both chuckle.     

One Hundred and Fifty One

Everyone wants to know the truth, and no one wants to know the truth. This is a paradox to those who imagine they must want one or the other, but not both. It’s always both.

Whatever we imagine the truth to be, it’s always different. Sometimes it’s better than what we imagine, and sometimes worse; but it’s never what we want because we don’t know ourselves well enough to know what we want.

What people want most, and fear most, is to know the truth. Knowing they're not what they imagine themselves to be, they decide it’s better not to know the truth.

One Hundred and Fifty

Everyone wants to live, and everyone wants to die.  This is a paradox to those who imagine they must want one or the other, but not both.  It’s always both.

Everyone wants a good death, one that completes a good life.  But most people live meaningless lives that aren’t completed, but merely ended, by equally meaningless deaths.    

Everyone wants to live not because their lives are good, but because they’re meaningless.  They know life is change, so they hope their lives will change for the better.  But as they grow old, they lose hope.

Some then kill themselves, but most don’t.  They choose not to kill themselves—which is not the same as choosing to live—because they no longer care whether they live or die.  

One Hundred and Forty Nine

I seldom remember my dreams now.  I know they’re not good only because I always wake feeling depressed.  This morning I remembered why.

Last night I dreamed I was back in school.  It was graduation day, and all the other students were celebrating. 

Everyone was dancing except me.  I made my way between the dancers, walking slowly towards the door of the principal’s office.  I had a question to ask her, but I was sure I already knew the answer,

She told me my degree was worthless.  I already knew that, so hearing it confirmed didn’t surprise me.  But it did fill me with pity for my fellow students, who were celebrating because they didn’t yet know what I had always known.

The immediate cause of this dream was a television documentary I watched last night about the privatization of the public schools. 

It featured a waitress who said she’d paid her way through a privatized school by waiting tables, only to learn on graduation day that the school wasn’t accredited, so her degree was worthless.  I remembered wondering how she could not have known this.  Didn’t she investigate the school before applying?       

Then I remembered thinking it didn't matter because all schools are worthless. 

I attended what was considered a good school (although the teachers complained to me that it wasn’t what it used to be; the destruction of the schools - of everything we used to call civilisation - has been going on for a long time), but no school prepares us for life; not the life I should have lived, the life we all should live. 

Teachers prepare us to live in this society by telling us to forget what every child knows, and believe - or rather suspend our disbelief - in our society's myths. They do this not out of malice or jealousy, because they want us to fail as they did, but because they know living in this society without the illusion of hope is unbearable.