“I think it’s so easy to be bitter. To be angry at the wound left behind, but that’s the deal we make, right? That’s what we signed up for, whether you like it or not. When you choose to love, you are choosing to lose. You signed a contract. I mean, cause everyone either leaves or dies…. So really, we should be grateful. Really, we’re lucky that it hurts in ways we can’t know. perhaps we loved her in ways that we can’t understand and maybe that makes it all okay. Because the pain means you did something worth doing. You loved someone worth loving. “
Jon stares over the podium to silence as a welling begins to surge in his chest. He always thought that when this day came, he would be strong where others couldn’t be. That he’d impart wisdom about the nature of death and grief, something he had pondered often. A professor in philosophy, what had his study prepared him for if not this? But as he looks out across a sea of grief, he is unsure. He can’t help but feel that it’s not okay. That when his wife was senselessly taken, that’s precisely what it was. Senseless. pain.
‘It’s not okay’ he felt.
“no” he begins, “It’s not okay… I’m sorry, it’s not okay. The world is worse for having lost her and there’s really not much we can do. Contract or not, it’s awful. ” He pauses.
“It’s just terrible.” He can hardly shake the words from his throat. “We can cry and we can love harder…and we can try to remember. That’s all we have.”
Imagine for a moment that I asked you to look into the night sky and determine who was winning.
“The darkness” You’ll say.
why?
“Because there is more empty space than stars. In fact, the empty space overwhelms matter by infinite orders of magnitude. Even within every atom of every star, there is empty space. More nothing than something.” you’ll say.
But there used to be no light. No stars. Only darkness. As many orders of magnitude more there is of darkness, there are infinitely more magnitudes of light than there used to be. And that light has to permeate throughout billions of light years of space just to reach our eyes. The whole of space is saturated with light for us. Does that seem like losing to you?
You are born into a terrible world. Tragedy, betrayal, pain, loss and injustice lurk in every corner of every life. Even the most privileged of us will fail to escape the indomitable pressure of the suffering of life; And if you encounter no suffering until your twilight, which you certainly will, everyone you know and love will die. Just like the sky and her emptiness, darkness consumes all. Surely suffering wins. Surely we are shackled like slaves to the hurt. Surely we are children of the darkness. Born from it, sentenced to live in it, damned to be consumed by it. Forced to watch it eat our brothers and sisters. We are foot soldiers on a nuclear battlefield, under assault on every front, overwhelmed by an impossibly powerful force. There are no prisoners of war here. Only those lucky enough to earn a swift death. It is an unrelenting, indifferent, cruel and taunting darkness. Surely the darkness wins.
But what’s this? Amidst the chaos and the suffering, someone is knocked down for the hundredth time. Thousandth maybe, they’ve lost count. They’ve lost their jobs. They’re homeless. Their heart’s been broken. They’re ill. They’ve lost their spouse, or their brother, or their mother, or all three. They’ve been raped, assaulted, robbed, buried, addicted. Shrouded in the cold indifferent abyss they lay, tired and wounded. The darkness bears down on them with impossible weight. “Stay down” it says. “I win”.
And on a battlefield of which victory is unheard of, they resist. They stand. Despite it all, they determine to love, to be virtuous, to defend the weak, to oppose, in every possible vector, the darkness that closes in. To engage in an unwinnable fight of which they will surely not survive, someone else stands. “Stay down” says the darkness. Someone else stands. “Stay down” it says. Then another, and another. Thousands, millions, billions rise to face the void, on a battlefield of which victory is unheard of. Weapons of virtue in hand. Galaxies of effort stand unified against the abyss. Before them, there was only darkness, and so it will be after them. But in this moment, there is unprecedented light; and the more intolerable the fight, the brighter they shine. Every ‘i love you’, every charitable act, every kiss, every hug, every sacrifice, every truth told, every good deed is a swipe of their sword that cuts unbearably deep into the void. Penetrating the darkness with blinding light. And, if only for a moment, there is meaning. Potent and intemperate, impossibly profound meaning saturates and overwhelms. On a battlefield of which victory is unheard of, without respite, they overpower their adversary.
The human condition is not characterized by suffering. Rather, It is defined by our rebellion. When the world buries us, when the universe compels us to hate, to sin against ourselves, to forsake love, to forsake effort, to forsake meaning, we rebel. when the darkness says “stay down”, we stand. And when we stand, we bring life. We bring meaning. We bring weapons unheard of. God slayers that subdue the infinite power of our adversaries. The universe is infinite and meaningless, and we are its necessary and mortal opponent; Finite and infinitely meaningful. Just as there is no light without darkness and no good without suffering. Just as the night sky would not have stars without her emptiness, we are the response to nothing. We are the stars that illuminate and define the shrouded and undefined. We find ourselves in a battle of attrition, and we will be outlasted. For now, we stand.
Have you noticed that pseudo-intellectuals tend to cognitively posture by accusing “normal” people of being boring? I used to be like this. “normal people are so boring. Imagine talking about the weather! Small talk is small minded” I would say. If you think this way, I do not regret to inform you that you are pretentious, and it’s YOU who’s boring. If you can’t be interested in the infinite depth of someone, their beliefs and their beliefs about their beliefs, then you are the small-minded person. Or, more likely, you are self-involved. Dying to discuss your own opinions and beliefs, uninterested in inquiring about someone else and their equal, if not greater, experiences.
Dissenters might rebuttal my assertion by saying that they are “genuinely more interesting! They can talk about philosophy and religion and science and theory. What can normal people talk about?” If you are the dissenter I speak of, it might serve you to note that you can’t actually talk about these things either. You speak superficially. You ask someone what they think about panpsychism so that you might be able to express your own thoughts in an attempt to sound intelligent and interesting. Anyone can discuss these topics if you are genuinely interested in discussing them. Do you want to know the questions you’d ask if you were genuinely interested in someone’s framework of philosophy? You’d ask why. Why did you choose to do this? How do you feel about your choice? Do you regret your choice? Why didn’t you choose to do something else? Most people don’t spend their time in their head. They don’t ponder philosophies, theories, or religion in great depth. Not because they’re dumb, but because they’ve already made up their mind on the topic; And the abstract implications of their beliefs and philosophies inherently manifest in what they choose to do, why they choose to do it, how they feel about what they chose to do and how they feel about those feelings. All of which are far more interesting, complex and worth discussing than whatever pseudo-intellectual garbage you want to regurgitate from a book that you read recently. If you were really interested in “intellectual pursuit”, your pursuit would not be a pursuit of self-indulgence, as it so often is. It would be a pursuit of curiosity, admiration and discovery. If your conversation is about the weather, that’s your fault. You’re boring, self-involved, and you can’t be bothered to be genuinely curious.
Is it in poor taste to want to stand out? To want to be better than I am? Better than you are? I sit on a streetcorner in Utrecht, swallowed by the crowd, overcome with sonder. The infinite context of every word spoken and every brick placed, laid bare for me to see. Every cigarette butt and rusty bike. Every drag taken on my joint that the coffeeshop had cut with tobacco, unbeknownst to me. The rain tapped my coat, and I wondered why I felt dizzy. I sat for hours observing that for which I lacked comprehension. The streets were like the canal. Flowing past me with no regard. From where you come, I know not; and to where you’ll go, I know even less. Dear river, your infinity, I want to drink it all! I beg to know your adventures, your loves, your tragedies, your triumphs and losses. But I don’t merely wish to know of them, I want to be intimate with them! Take them to bed and study their hair while they listen to my lungs drag in contaminated air. I want to argue with them and plan a future with them. I want to discuss our kids’ names, and I want them to break my heart. I want to hate them for how much I love them. I want to profess a eulogy at their funeral and watch them fade into the feedback noise of Time until there’s nothing left but an impression of something that used to be. An abstraction of all the life that wasn’t lived. I want to be them. Do you want to be me? Would you then be fulfilled in your pursuit of life? I suppose it is in poor taste to want to be better than you.
Psuedothought 