July 10, 2012

• a train in the mountains

  This post is a long drive into the middle of nowhere.

   

  Because that’s what I felt like doing in my car and is what I do all too often do in my thoughts.

   

  It is so easy to fall behind with other people. A new perception dawns on you – but it has nothing to do with the present discourse, so you leave it out. It never comes up, and you forget about it entirely.

   

  You have no idea the fantastical forms you take in the minds of others.

   

  It is odd that every situation is a new one; I always feel in entirely unfamiliar circumstances. This is true of life and existence. In life because every circumstance is slightly different – or much different – than the one before. And in existence because I wake up every day as a human, and I have never been a human before. One may say that I have been a human all the days before the present one. But that is to define a human as existing in a single moment in time – suppose being a human meant living as a human being from start to finish, from birth to death. In relation to eternity I have never been a human before, and this gives me the odd feeling as I wake up – ‘still here, this isn’t a dream.’

   

  Am I behind in reconciling to existence? Or are others behind in not realizing the impossibility of reconciliation?

   

  It is not a natural thing to realize you exist – you have to continue to prove your own freedom to yourself.  Drive your car to a park, stand in the middle of the park and shout ‘I am the greatest of dinosaurs’. Drive home and as you walk inside it will be impossible to not realize that you exist. And when you realize your freedom what you end up doing takes on an added significance, the fact that it is being done by a being conscious of its power to walk away, to do anything else.

   

  It would be a beautiful sadness to live in worshipful wonder of who someone is.

   

  On the fourth of July God made long interstates of lightning stretch out across the sky.  

   

  Sometimes I feel like everywhere I go there is nothing but criticism – people in the news, people at work, people in the church, all unhappy about something, teaching unhappiness as a doctrine of life. It makes me wonder, why is this the norm? Why is everyone always tearing things down? But I realize it because the opposite cannot take the form of a criticism. The opposite of criticalness is to enjoy each moment deep in your being. It is harder to notice happiness than unhappiness. These uncritical people, these artists of existence, are out there, and they quietly and wisely ignore the chaos of unhappiness to be found everywhere. But they have no way to communicate their knowledge, no direct way to say ‘You should not be unhappy’ -for then they would have entered the world they see no value in.

   

  It is sad but beautiful that each person’s life is deeply their own, and that you cannot force anyone else to be happy.

   

  You will find many melancholy things if you desperately seek the truth.  But you ought to seek truth nonetheless.  For in doing so you will also find how deep the joy at merely existing can go. 

   

  Suppose there is much sadness to be had in life – would it be merely enough for your God to hush up the sadness, give you toys to play with when it is all over?  Or would the only true kind of happiness be a transformation of these sad truths, an inclusion of their redemption into something beautiful?    

   

  It often feels in thinking that I have come across something true, a fact about life as a whole. This experience is had by everyone. But when I read conclusions by thinkers and writers of the past, they often strike me as very strange interpretations of life and its happenings. From that writer’s perspective, however, it must have seemed so.  But the claims we make are about ‘life’, as though life were an objective thing and we were responding to its truths. We aren’t just saying these things seem true, but that they are true. This makes me wonder what life actually is, what are the bedrock mechanics of the thing that appears in so many different forms to so many different people? When you take away all the different words and thought-devices and colorings of our personalities onto what we see, what is there that is actually going on, what is the thing that me and everyone in the past and present share? But when I think about this everything seems silent.

   

  Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m’effraie.

   

  A drive to the middle of nowhere. 

  • 2:08 am
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