Historians are the people who realize

that the present is the loneliest place of all.  

When your grandparents are alive,

the night sky is a huge blanket

wrapped around your warm body at night.

Tonight for the first time I looked up and saw

how thin, how empty, how full of echoes it is. 

And I felt terribly alone.

But what of the grand project of history? 

Dig deeper for their graves: you will find them nowhere.

The present is interminably alone with itself;

the lone frightful survivor of all its deceased cousins.

Flee, flee the feeling that you have inherited the world,

and make friends of the dead, for the dead

converse more readily than any other.

And what a wonderful banquet was history: 

Everyone was connected in the past, for it is easier

to imagine actions, communion, stories,

than people sitting alone for long hours on end.

But once all your parents and friends are dead,

you will see what history never told you.

The present is the loneliest place of all.

On my way to work I had a conversation with my past self.  He wasn’t happy.

Death is when all your moments are gone, and so each moment that passes is a small part of that larger death.  You do not have to think to the future to know what death is; it passes through us even now, taking each moment anew.

Yet each moment is the only life we shall ever have; you have never been anywhere but the present.  You thus live at the intersection of all the things; every arriving moment declares itself as the only life you shall ever have, and then quickly passes on into being part of the only death you will ever have. 

The extremity of our position is loud and demanding; but we live moderately, vaguely, sluggishly.

Of a thing some people ask ‘Why does it matter?’ of which others ask ‘What else could matter?’

Each of us is a balloon that gets bigger as each person gets to know us.  As they know more and more, we become a large idea, a full orchestra of possible thoughts and actions, a person with deep hopes and cares.  But then a stranger says hello to us and – pop! the whole balloon is gone.

We have to keep reinflating ourselves with each person we meet.  But it always pops just the same.

It is a much harder thing to meet people when you are older.  I mean really meet them.  For they have been many places and had many thoughts, thus there is more of them to meet; but it is all lost on dusty bookshelves, rotting in the libraries hidden deep in their labyrinthine caves of thoughts and memories. Only perchance in conversation will you stumble upon the occasional grotto, and pick up a book, and read a line, after which you will ‘hmph‘ and place it neatly back where it was.

You are called to do the right thing; you are always where you need to be.

Life is difficult, but there are two kinds of difficulty.  Sometimes there are external things – like other people – that are in the way of what we want to do.  Other times we are in the way of doing what we want.  We know what it is to life a holy life, but our will is trampled by angry crowds of thoughts it is natural to pick up from a thousand places.  The meaning of life is not a public thing.

I fall apart so quickly.  But I sometimes get stitched together again by a new thought, an unexpected caring word from a friend, a sudden encouragement from God.  It is a wonderful thing to help stitch someone together.

Do not make a list of the things you control.  You will be depressed at how short it is.

There is no pop culture.  Each person is their own culture, and the blinking signs and witty words will fade away, and we will find what is left.

You will meet many people in life, and they will think many odd things about you, about what you mean and why you are as you are, what thoughts you never say, the ways they think it all connects together for you.  If you could view every image of you you would see misshapen, jumbled scraps of clay arranged in every which manner.  Thus it is here you wonder where you are – what you are – amidst this sea of chimerical creatures, each of which you find mysterious and otherly.  And if you strip away your layers of social thinking, the dross that covers everything you see and think, you will find that the heart of you is down in that place people can nearly never see, the place where you hope, and when that hope is combined with your will, the place where there is the you that tries.

God wants to save each person you conversed with today equally.

We know so little of what we should be.  When we cannot imagine what our thought lives would be like if we were holy, we cannot see much problem with how they are now.  The goal of life then becomes to be moderately happy.  But if you glimpse the thought of a truly godly soul, one that could approach the heavens and not faint, it brings us to the weeping realization of our total uncleanness.  And the goal of an unclean person is not happiness; it is salvation. 

Lord, pick us up, for the gravity of filth is stronger than any thought I could rise against it.

Somewhere there must be a buried simplicity.  I am thankful I got to be alive.

That there is any hope of salvation ought to make us infinitely happy.

Always thinking about God, about the universe, about life - what is your actual relation to the world. You are in it.

I greatly long for and dread the day when I will be able to see my deepest flaws.

I admit there are some people who seem huge powerful forces that arrange everything that happens in their lives.  They somehow only have good experiences and their life adds up into an amazing chronicle of adventures and meaning.  It seems like they have a control that is making everything happen according to a plan.  These people range from my friends to celebrities.  But all I can say for me is that I haven’t got a clue.  I don’t know how everything fits together.  I don’t know if it will all work out, if things will come together and add up to something; I can only hope that they do. 

For as creatures of limited sight, what are we at bottom if not hope?  And so tomorrow God will give us a new day and we will try to stand up again, and perhaps out of the oblivion next to us a helping hand will come, and a new stitch will be woven; but a stitch is by nature temporary, and at night we pray that someday we will be made into a new people.

I jumped in front of the swashbuckling statue and struck my finest Napoleon.
“People only like war because violence is predictable,” said the girl with the lemon sweater and shoulder-slung carry bag.  “Only conversation will lead you out of canvas paintings.”
I snarled and jumped in front of her with a fierce jealousy for a true life in my eyes.  “I challenge you to a duel of meaningful lives.”
“I do that with everyone,” she said, bored. “Drinks?”
In the taxi cab I looked at her knees.  “I don’t know if I like doing nothing or hanging out with you more.”
“Everything’s just an attempt to escape boredom.”  She didn’t play with her hair. 
The bar was brown and smelled like cardboard music.  I told the bartender things and then we clinked glasses of ginger ale and whiskey.  “To never understanding each others’ family histories,” I belted, silencing the bar.
We drank.  A funny look crossed her temples and she pointed at me.  “A demon a thousand miles away seems very similar to a demon nine hundred ninety-nine miles away.”
“Did you just undress my mind with your eyes?”
We walked out into a rain that smelled like a fall ocean.  My suede pants were brought to their existential dénouement.  I felt like buying a barrel to store memories in that I could one day burn rather than sift through.  I smiled like a spelunker skipping school.  She smiled like an orca whale after the extinction of humans.
The cars made their turns and soon the street was empty of the noisy hagglers of eternity.  Water burgeoned like a revolution of ancient children coming out of their caves; I looked over at her, concerned that I would miss the water droplets splattering on her face.  Inches from our sketchers-planted feet was a guzzling sewer.
“Cities breed alcoholism, materialism, and greed.  There are no heroes anymore.”
I stopped watching the droplets and looked at her eyes burning blue as a white dwarf.  “I associate you with sorrow.”
It was a couple hours or days later.  I slicked my hair back and she hopped up and down on the porch of our dreams, a regular stoop in front of a yellow suburban house in a claustrophobic sea of its empty clones. 
“Yes?” a crinkled woman with a brown reef of hair asked.
“Have you found the meaning of life?”
We had a feeling, but not a comunicable one.
“No feeling is communicable, silly,” she said, popping her eyes out at me with her regular philosophy-wide smile.  She always had a Greek god’s sentiment looking at my head, as if to say “That’s where you live?”  It was endearing and infuriating.  I didn’t speak to her for a year.  I genuflected on her doorstep when I realized I never remembered a word anyone else said.
“Humans want badly to be loved and are the most hateable thing there is.”  She sucked on her milkshake straw like a rescue helicopter.
“They’re not any less loveable for being humble,” I remarked. “But most humility is just arrogance.”
“I’m done.”  I hadn’t started my honeydew milkshake. I gave it to her and she finished it in the time it takes a dog to bark at a doorbell.  She was wearing a malachite sweater; it brought out her freckled neck.
“Commercialism dampens creativity for all but a few,” I buzzed while walking with the stride of a Praetorian guard. 
“It’ll get better,” she hoped aloud. ”It’s a virtue to let a person finish their point to their own satisfaction.”
“My whole life is a point.”  She started running before I figured it out.  “Hey! All the world’s vices will not melt into one unexpected virtue!” I yelled like a street cop’s whistle a moment later. 
I had a knack for catching the world before it fell on her; she had a knack for finishing my visions of a perfect future.  But we were cynical children at heart that learned to cope with iPeople by swordfighting on park benches.
We were always walking, the perpetual myth of going somewhere.  In deathly winter mists we would walk and talk without seeing each other. 
“Winter brings out the best in everyone,” she said.
“Their silence?”
I loved her most for the times she would tear down the towers I had thought my most sure hiding places.
One winter day we walked and said nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing but the world’s kindness to change.  Then from within the blinding deluge of meteorite snowflakes she married me in her mind and said,
“You’re the only person who makes sense to me. I don’t know what keeps everyone else going.”
Vinátta, I thought.

I don’t need to ask you about your new relationship … I have Facebook.

I don’t need to listen to my annoying friend … I can text.

I don’t have to greet people in the street … I have my iPod. 

I don’t have to read … I have television.

I don’t have to find people on a friday night … I have Netflix. 

I don’t have to look at other humans … I have my iPhone.

I don’t need an actual book … I have a Kindle. 

What has happened? 

When you look at the night sky you are looking at the ancient past. Some stars we see are already dead. We can’t see that they’re dead; they look like they are still there, burning bright in the universe, letting the whole world know that they are immortal. But some day the news will reach: they will blink in the sky for a few weeks, a last triumphant blast of light proclaiming the fact of their importance—that they were a star—before they fade into the darkness and their days of life, having lasted for billions of years, go unremembered by their grave of a silent black hole.

If you look at the stars closely enough you can see your own death written in them just the same. Our present life, in fact, is much like theirs, an illusion that hides the fact that we are already dead. We see our fate, as sure as the brightest supernova, bursting in the night sky, a sad final bravura to the glowing life we had assumed we could keep. But now we finally see that we are living in the past, as already dead creatures merely walking towards our final end, blinking our eyes just as the those stars twinkle who the universe already knows to be deceased.

Turn your eyes not from it, for it is all there is to see. You are here on earth, as sure as you wave your arm in front of you, but you also look down on yourself from the sky, seeing your current self as a creature long in the past of this one sure fact.

The difference is that we are not stars, we are not public matter, for in that final moment you will be the only one to see your life story ignite and burn into dust.

But your black hole of a grave will keep you a secret just the same.

I think perhaps the hardest of the Lord’s commands is the one to not worry.  Other commands are certainly difficult, but there’s something about worrying that seems right, so why should we not do it?  Doesn’t it mean we care about the right things?

In my case, no.  I am the best (or the worst?) worrier of all time.  Whichever one means I do it more than you.  Living in my head is like sitting in a theatre where they only play horror trailers that relate to situations that are actually in your life.  And these movies must be making money, otherwise they would have never come out with You’re Going to Fail This Class 87, or Your Car Probably Has a Ticket on It 176, or Everyone Probably Hates You 9,234.  

Those things, however, are actually moderately realistic compared to a lot of things that I imagine happening.  I remember last spring break we were trying to climb up this huge wall in Washington D.C.  At the top of the wall was a hedge, and beyond the hedge was a person’s backyard.  In a split moment I imagined one of us getting over the hedge only to find a huge Bengalian tiger, which causes us to jump back over the hedge, and that in turn leads the tiger to jump over the hedge to its death.  The people who owned the tiger are then furious and sue and we have to pay them thousands of dollars. 

That’s not even one worry.  There’s a fear of dangerous wildlife and domestic court cases, all heaped into one scenario.  And where did the tiger thought even come from?

That is only one example that I remember pretty clearly.  I am constantly imagining buildings burning down, how that guy is going to mug me, the semi crashing into me, people deciding to never be friends with me again because I was late to something, and so on.  And of course the worry that someone is going to drive away with my car while it is outside defrosting.  A lot of my worries are the opposite, though: they are worries that it will look like I was committing some crime, and in my worry I end up imagining how I would explain it in court.  I always snap out of those and think, ‘Did I really take that thought experiment all the way to me on the witness stand?’  

It appears in my dreams all the time too.  Last night I dreamt I was getting on a school bus, but I asked the driver to leave so that I could drive it instead.  Then instead of general television I flipped on Mrs. Doubtfire for everyone’s personal televisions (it was like an airplane).  Someone told on me so I had to explain myself to the principal and I kept on explaining how I was just like Mrs. Doubtfire, doing something rather unorthodox, but it was actually good for the kids when you thought about it. 

When I think about the way I tend to worry, the command makes a lot more sense.  A worry is something that necessarily looks away from rather than at the thing that you value.  If you worry you are thinking of loss, rather than the thing you gained.  Like the other day at school when I imagined falling down a long flight of concrete steps.  I think God wants us to be careful, but more than that (that’s just smarts), I think he wants us to know what life really is, how awesome it is, how beautiful it is, how it is his overwhelming gift to us.  Because most of the time none of us really get it, and that’s because we’re too busy worrying.

I dripped out of the lives
of people who didn’t even know I was in them.
Our bones will regrow themselves
once we find a body to live in.

Sleepy angels by my bed
would tell me beautiful stories that are not true.
Of how they are all fallen stars;
but tonight I stare at the icy moon.

I still visit the graveyard
where I bury all the lives I’ll never lead.
My imagination lets go,
and another ghost of mine is freed.

Another angel died tonight.
I buried him in the cold under a moonlit sky.
I walked away a lonely man.
But until every grave is filled, my hope it will not die.